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Transcripts of
(Unedited nor corrected)
Alaska Pioneers
1. Jim King 1
2. Cal Lensink 42
3. Hank Hansen 62
4. Jerry Lawhorn 86
5. Tom Wardleigh 93
6. Brina Kessel 99
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Jim King
I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska for 33 years, starting out
as a game management agent in territorial days when the Fish and Wildlife
Service operated as a Game Department in Alaska and we did all the wildlife
work that was done in Alaska then. So, it was a job that included things like duck
banding and game surveys and then a big part of it was law enforcement and --
Well, there was some early game laws that applied to Alaska and some that were
designed for Alaska, but they were kind of political and local oriented and it
wasn't until 1925 that a real game law was passed and there was a set up
designed for monitoring what was going on with the Game Commission, the
Alaska Game Commission, it was called.
They hired local guys and even when I was hired I didn't go through the normal
government process of being on a register or what not. I just filled out some
employment papers and you know, never did take a civil service test, I guess.
So, it was a system that worked pretty good but what had been going on was that
you had all this hoard of people that showed up with the gold rush and no rules
so, they were doing what ever was handy with wildlife.
Judge Wickersham, an honorable and well respected important person in Alaska,
he described going up the Cantishna River. He was going to climb Mount
McKinley and he had a big group of people and they shot a moose every two
days because they couldn't keep the meat and they'd have fresh meat for a
couple of days and they'd have to get another one. He did comment on that, that
it was a shame they were wasting all this meat.
Well, that sort of thing was going on, foxes were worth a lot of money and some
trappers would go out and shoot a moose or a caribou and fill it, you know scatter
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strychnine, strychnine all around and foxes would come. And they'd, they'd pick
up the foxes but also an array of birds and ravens and raptors of one sort or
another and bears and wolverines and those things would become a really
unattractive mess for if somebody had been using strychnine. So, those early
game laws ended the use of poisons for one thing and, and there was a lot of
support for that.
Yes, that's right. The, let's see there was a, Alfred Brooks, who the Brooks
Range is named after, wrote a book about Alaska resources. He was one of the
first people to talk about the oil seeps on the north slope, which the natives of
course, knew about. That they could burn this stuff that came squirting out here
and there or bubbling out.
But, he had said in this book, that he wrote somewhere in the early part of the
20th century, that it was too bad that the beaver and the martin and the sea otter
were on the road to extinction and would soon be gone and, but that was the
price of progress. And so then in 1925 for the first time there was real interest in,
in curbing that form of progress to a certain degree and so, they did a good job.
They stopped the, those early guys, they stopped the use of poisons, market
hunting and this business of wasting meat, because you couldn't keep it. And all
the really wasteful practices and the people that lived in the bush by in large
supported that. And the game wardens were kind of part of the country and were
not considered oh, invaders or government bureaucracy that was being abusive
of the people. They could see immediately that this was helping.
Well, there was a guy named Sam White that lived in Fairbanks in the late 20's.
And when they were just starting to develop airplanes and he had a big dog team
and he described as a group of or a pack of free thinking dogs that he would tie
up to his sled and go off looking for violators with the dogs hooping and howling.
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and spend all his time tending his dogs. And he was the one that recognized the
possibility of airplanes.
And I think it was 1929 that he learned to fly and bought a little airplane and flew
out and caught somebody doing something wrong, shooting cow moose or
something. And he proceeded to use this airplane some and he got a lot of
criticism from it. And there were memos in the files when I went to work in
Fairbanks scolding Sam White for being out in his airplane on working time.
He went and did a moose count with his airplane and there was a memo telling
him to take annual leave for the time he was in his airplane and get out with his
dog team and do a proper moose count.
So, there was a lot of that and, it got rough and he quit over that but by the time
he quit he had pretty well set the pattern of using airplanes. As far as I know he
may have been the first person in the world that tried to use airplanes for any
kind of conservation work.
And I think the thing that really got it going was he and Clarence Rhode made a
joint patrol along the border with the Canadian Mounties. And there was a lot of
illegal traffic and fur back and forth across the border and they were able to
gather up a number of these people that were doing that.
One of the things was that Alaska had a bounty on wolves so every Canadian
was trying to send his wolves to Alaska to get the fifty-dollar bounty and things
like that were going on.
Well, the biological survey went back, what to the late 1800's but in 1940 I think it
was that the Biological Survey and the Bureau of commercial fish or the Bureau
of Fisheries or something were combined into the Fish and Wildlife Service so
that was, that was eleven or twelve years before my time started.
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Well, this border patrol with the Canadians well, that kind of caught the public
fancy. And there was stories in the newspapers about it and got the attention I
guess, of people higher up in the Fish and Wildlife Service or Biological Survey
then. And they begin to recognize the potential and then World War II came
along and of course, everybody got drafted or into you know.
World War II hit Alaska pretty hard and Alaska was invaded and that had a
dramatic effect on everybody that was there. So, the Fish and Wildlife Service
kind of almost vanished during that period and there was a big influx of military.
And perhaps another abusive period on the wildlife. There was a lot of
controversy over that and books have been written about conflicts with the
military. and but, After the war then this rebuilding process went into effect.
Clarence Road had, had been on this border patrol and he became first in, he
learned to fly as a result of that and then spent some time setting up an aircraft
division in Anchorage. And as a result of, of that work, he kind of caught the
attention as a good manager and organizer. And he went on to be the regional
director of the Alaska region. And he wanted everybody in the organization that
wanted to fly, and he encouraged young people, like me to get a license. And,
and you know it was easier to learn to fly then to, to not in a way.
I was stationed in Fairbanks and we had three airplanes there then and I think
there was only four agents.
Starting, I went to work in 1951, in Fairbanks, so.
I went through the normal you know, flight school kind of thing in Fairbanks.And
then they had a rule then that you had to have a license and a hundred hours of
experience before you could then go through a check ride with the aircraft
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division people. And then initially you would be authorized to fly under
somebody's direction. And there was a very experienced pilot in Fairbanks and
in charge of the station. And I flew with him a lot and, and you know for the next
two or three years, after I got authorized to fly, I was supposed to not make any
trips that I didn't check out with him and --
Well, I was, the beginning of waterfowl surveys was occurring then. You know
this was the same period that they were developing in the prairies. And we were
a little behind so initially in the early 50's some of the game management agents
were doing waterfowl surveys in their own districts. And it produced a product
that was hard to deal with.
There were some biologists then who in Juneau and other places that were trying
to put a forecast to the fall flight. And as soon as he could manage it Roads
wanted to get a full time waterfowl biologist assigned to this.
And so about 1956 he brought on Hank Hanson who had been a World War II
fighter pilot and an instructor in waterfowl at Washington State. And had worked
for Washington State Wildlife Department doing waterfowl, duck work.
And so, Hank kind of reorganized these, initial efforts that the game agents had
been working on. And the other key figure was Dave Spencer, who had been
involved with starting transect surveys in the prairies, and he did the first
waterfowl surveys on the Yukon delta in 1949.
And well that was when descriptions of the waterfowl, before that people just
talked about clouds of waterfowl, or that kind of thing but no numbers. And
Spencer identified the big goose nesting areas on the Yukon delta for brant and
emperor geese. And he wrote a paper called Alaska's or American's greatest
goose brant nesting area. And it was the first real description of that except oh,
there'd been people on the ground before that had come before like E.W. Nelson
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who toured with a dog team on the Yukon delta and Olaus Maurie and some
other people had come by dog team to Hooper bay on the Yukon delta and then
stayed till mid summer and they described the birds there in some detail.
And there was two or three books written about that but it wasn't till these
airplane surveys that you could really describe what was going on, on the Yukon
delta and that was sort of true of all the big valleys in Alaska and the big coastal
plains.
Well, that started in '49 with Spencer extending the systems that he'd helped
develop on the, on the prairies.
Well, they set up a 16 mile strip usually marked with a pencil on a map and then
the pilot and a person on the right would fly along this strip at about a hundred
feet and counted all the birds within an eighth of mile. And there were various
ways to learn how to judge the eighth of a mile strip. And so, if you flew a 16 mile
transact and counted all the birds for an eighth of a mile on each side, you had a
four mile square sample, that would be a quarter of a 16 miles.
And so then you could take the data from that and apply random sampling
statistics to, if you did enough of these things to determine you know, some
sampling error and come up with a pretty good figure. You learn pretty quick
whether you need to do more or you'd done enough and that sort of thing.
Well, then after Spencer started do that on the Yukon delta, it wasn’t known how
to set these things and that '49 survey he, he did a variety of patterns with these
things and then other people set them up in the other valleys. It became evident
that the really thickest, densest duck populations weren't on the Yukon delta they
were on the Yukon flats. Right in the northern part of the Yukon river valley which
just touches the Arctic circle.
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And people hadn't paid much attention to that area before the airplane because
in the summer time it was just a big boggy place. It was hard to get around. The
natives there moved to the river in the summer and then the country was pretty
empty.
In the wintertime, people were running around with dog teams and hunting
moose and trapping but in the summer it was just, people weren't out there until
airplanes came along. Well, there was a little bit of people out first thing in the
spring shooting muskrats but after the muskrats were gone, all the nesting
season, the area just wasn't, wasn't useful.
Well, it came here to Patuxent and was used in, in the forecasts and the
regulation setting process and, you know, it evolved over time. One of the things
that of course was immediately obvious was that you didn't see everything when
you were flying a, you know going at 90 miles an hour across the tundra and
things are going by pretty fast.
And so they started working on a correction factor for the things you didn't see
and there was a lot of work on that done in the prairies where they could send a,
a ground crew along a road at the same time they were sending an airplane
overhead. And you know, they actually could do it simultaneously and the guys
on the ground would come up with a figure for what was on the lake and then
compare with, with what the pilots saw, lake by lake actually.
And that continues and they do change the correction factor every year in the
prairies but that doesn't work in Alaska cause there wasn't any roads to, to run
down. So, they had some sort of standard correction factor for a number of
years. I don't know how they came out with it but, it was very, way below so for a
number of years it showed Alaska didn't produce very many birds because we
didn't have a proper correction factor. And actually Bruce got into that with a
helicopter a few years ago and, and now there are pretty good correction factors
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for Alaska that show that Alaska actually produces a lot more birds then were
originally thought. This is always kind of a discovery process.
Well, yeah, it started with the district agents you know, and then statehood came
along and, and law enforcement authority went to the state for wildlife. And so
the game management agents, such as myself, were either transferred outside
or, or went into another job. And I became a refuge manager then and then I was
the refuge manager on the Yukon delta for a few years and then switched. to
Hank Hanson transferred to, actually to, to this area, to Washington and so I
then had the survey job which I did for 20 years. But it was kind of a, initially it
was a discovery process.
There were more oh, little river deltas that we looked at and we looked at
distribution of swans and separated the trumpeter swan from the, the tundra
swan nesting areas. We got more into banding birds and determined where the,
see a lot of the white fronted geese from Alaska. They're all over Alaska, half of
them go down the Pacific flyway to California and the other half go east of the
mountains to Texas.
And you know, these were kind of exciting things to learn. And then in this period
the new states first senator, one of the first senators, Ernest Greening decided he
needed to bring home a big chunk of money to improve the economy in Alaska.
And the, the way he was going to do it was to dam up the Yukon and create the,
the Lake Erie size impoundment and the biggest hydro project in the United
States, bigger then any other hydra project in Russia. This sort of flooded the
entire Yukon flats. And it, the dam was to be at a little village called Rampart so
the project became the Rampart Dam Project.
And there was enough concern at that time there was oh, legislation requiring
wildlife studies for hydra projects before they were, were done. And so there was
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so many to, to study the fish in the Yukon, which were important. King salmon
and dog salmon both came that far up in big numbers and native populations
were dependent on these fish.
And then these early transact counts had shown large numbers of ducks on the
Yukon Flats so we had two years to do a duck study there. Cal Lensing set up
plots and did production studies and I spent two summers there banding ducks.
And we banded about , I think 18,000 ducks that were a variety of species. That
video you had, showed people at Canvasback Lake. We named that, We caught
some Canvasbacks there.
But the interesting thing about these ducks that we banded, there was they
distributed. I don't know, to 40 other states and all the provinces to Ontario. And
the canvas backs that we caught there, lots of them wound up in Chesapeake
Bay and they were hunted in places like Fingerlakes in New York. We got a lot
of our bands and the, oh, the lesser scaup were hunted heavily in, in Minnesota
and all the way down the Mississippi flyway to Louisiana in, in big numbers. And
that's a, you know, our survey showed that scaup were a big producer on the
flats, so this was kind of exciting and suddenly wildlife people began to think
more about hey, this place is producing something for us. and the International
Association of Fish and Wildlife Commissioners, that's an organization that
changes it's name every few years so I probably haven't got it right.
(Tape change)
Well, Clarence Road who was the regional director in the 50's was a pilot and --
Well, there were extensive ground studies which is necessary to you know, count
ducklings and that sort of thing and Cal Lensing did these plot counts to get a
feel for the productivity of the area and then I did this banding and these birds
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just went swish all over the country and some of them got as far as the
Caribbean and some of them got as far as Panama.
And it showed that here this valley in Alaska was producing something for people
all over North America and Central America and it is a unique place. I don't see
people talking about what a unique thing this Yukon Flats is but it’s, we used to
talk about it as a sun bowl because it's on the arctic circle and it's protected from
the coast by mountains in all directions and so protected from storms.
And the arctic sun just goes round and round in the spring you get a type of
heating that's not normal in the arctic because of the protection the hills give it.
And these lakes we were banding ducks on, we actually measured 70 degree
water temperatures, which I don't know if there's anyplace in Canada you can
find that on the arctic circle. And, and we used to laugh about these, they had a
program about Hawaii calling and they'd give the water temperature and the air
temperature and they'd both be close to 70 and we would get that on the Yukon
flats in the summer.
So, what you have is a, is a type of productivity that is similar to the best water
productivity of the Canadian prairies and Minnesota and the Dakotas. And the,
the duck fauna and densities are equal to the best anywhere in the country. So
there's about 20,000 square miles, something like that on the Yukon flats that
would have been flooded and this is this 70 degree.
I think your, your other video said something like 30,000 lakes or something like
that, but there's ducks everywhere and other birds too. It’s the highest density of
ducks in Alaska. The warmest summer temperatures and the greatest variety of
ducks and other birds. And of course at that time passerines didn't have a high
visibility in service activities and we didn't even look at all the passerines which
they are looking at now.
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But you know, some of us were kind of bird watchers and we did note the
different varieties there that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Alaska. So,
anyway I had an interesting personal aspect to that.
I got married the spring before we got into this banding, so I rented a cabin in
Fort Yukon and that was sort of, we laugh about it now, that was our honeymoon
home, Fort Yukon. But anyway, these ducks went so far and wide that it caught
the attention of, particularly the International Association of Fish and Wildlife
Agencies and they talked to the big conservation organizations and a lot of the
state game department directors, all registered strong objection to Rampart dam.
And Ernest Greening, who is a really eloquent speaker, I think he was one of the
great speakers in the Congress at that time, was preaching, ‘we've got to have
this electricity. And it got to be quite a, you know there was a lot stuff in the
newspapers and the reports and booklets came out. And people all over the
country were aware of that and this was the first, I guess ,I wouldn't say that but it
was one of the wildlife issues that caught the fancy of, of the country.
So then it was, about a few years late, when the statehood act had granted a
million some acres to the state of Federal land and it took a long time to, to sort
that out and decide which million acres they were going to get.
And then the native people came in and said well, this is our land and they filed
claims and Congress was working on that. And then it was Morris Udall and
Congressman Sailor, I think a few others in Congress decided well, if, if we're
going to decide what the state gets and what the natives get we ought to decide
what we want for parks and refuges. And let's see, I think it was Stuart Udall
that, that put a hold on what they called a land freeze, which was holding up
things like oil development or, exploration, Then he just established this freeze
until all of this land stuff was settled and I don't know, what did we get, 50 million
acres of waterfowl refuges?
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Well, I was doing these waterfowl surveys then in all the valleys and I actually
came back here and Cal Lensing (inaudible) and worked on the, we worked on
the Yukon flats together. We came back here and analyzed all that banding. Cal
did that and then I re-evaluated all the, the survey data and we drew boundaries
and then they were submitted as proposals for refuges and that was the, what
became the Tetlan refuge, the Yukon Flats, the Kuyukuk refuge, the Kanuit,
Novitana, Selewick and Inonoko and Yukon Delta. And those were the ones I
was involved in and the boundaries of those were, were really set on the survey
boundaries that we had been using for waterfowl.
Well, if you look at a relief map of Alaska, it's quickly apparent that the biggest
mountains in North America are sort of sprinkled across Alaska and in between
these big mountains are extremely low valleys. And like Fairbanks which looks
like it's in the middle of Alaska and in view of Mount McKinley is only 450 feet
above sea level I think and so you have this combination of very high terrain and,
and very low terrain--
Well, you have the highest mountains of North America scattered around in
Alaska with these really low elevation valleys in the interior there and they're
broad flood plains of big rivers. And in the interior, they're under laid by
permafrost even though the summer temperatures are similar to say Minnesota.
The annual temperature is way lower and you have this frozen substrate, which
prevents percolation of water.
So, you have all of this surface water that, and then another nice climatic
characteristic that makes Alaska important in this regard is that most of the
rainfall in the interior occurs in August and September.
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So you have a nice dry period in the spring for the baby ducklings to get their
start then before freeze up. It starts to rain and saturates the soil and then it
freezes in a saturated condition and the following spring it doesn't rain. But you
have the frost going down and water coming up in the, in the capillaries so you
have a nice rich vegetation even without any rainfall.
And kind of, well one of these neat systems that's developed there and so areas
like the Yukon flats are just covered with these really rich shallow lakes. And
because the water isn't percolating out and these were the areas that we were
looking at for initially assessing the waterfowl that were going to be hunted in
California primarily. But also in all of these other states down the Mississippi
flyway and, and to a certain extent further east, Chesapeake Bay.
So, Patuxent was developing this system of evaluating annual waterfowl
numbers. The spring surveys tell you, tell them what has survived the winter and
made it, made a successful spring migration. And then some ground studies
show how they, what kind of production they've had and this results in a forecast
of how many ducks are going to be available to, to hunt.
And if the numbers have gone down seasons can be shortened and bag limits
can be restricted or numbers are booming then regulations can be liberalized and
so that was the purpose of all these aerial surveys. But then when the Congress
decided they wanted to set up some refuges in Alaska, this fit right it.
We had the, we had the figures to, to sell these areas as valuable for refuges to
the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. When Cal Lensing and I came back
here was Spencer Smith and I remember when we first talked with him he said,
you know this was in the time that they were trying to oh, buy some refuge land
in the Dakotas with duck stamp money and spending a lot of money to get a little
production areas and he told us we want every acre of productive waterfowl
habitat in Alaska that we can get and our instructions were to draw the
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boundaries of these areas as big as we could justify and we did and we had fun
doing it. That was a nice invitation really.
Well, there's no roads and there are trails all over the Yukon Flats and some of
these other areas. But for getting out to the lakes where we were banding ducks
and for doing the production surveys which were based on plots, the only
practical way was to go by airplane. And so we had planes there at Fort Yukon
for that and the same is true of the Yukon Delta.
The Yukon delta is more of an Arctic climate even though it's south of the Yukon
flats, it's treeless tundra and but there's no roads and the only way to, there are
rivers and sloughes that you can get around in a boat. But really, if you're going
to go where the action is for the birds, you got to go the way they go and fly
there.
Well, one of the things we worked on then was developing boats we could carry
in the airplanes. And there was a guy in Juneau that worked with a manufacturer
-and this was prior to good quality inflatable boats - those things didn't exist
when we were doing these studies in the 60's. And he took a 16 foot fiberglass
boat and cut it in five pieces and put bulkheads in the thing and came up with a
deal you could stack up like a set of camp dishes. And then they had a pretty
good little boat we could put a motor on. We, for a while we were carrying
canoes on the airplanes outside, and even though we never had an accident with
the carry boats outside it was illegal for non-government people to do that. And it
wasn't a comfortable thing to be carrying a big bulky think outside of your
airplane. Airplanes aren't designed for that except for the beaver and so getting
the boats inside was, everybody was interested in that. Now, they have really
good inflatable boats so, that's the way to go but, this camp dish arrangement
was kind of fun for a while.
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Yeah, well it was a dream of Clarence Road that he would have all of his people
or as many as possible flying. And he used to say that the light airplane to his
people is as the pickup is to wildlife people in other places. He encouraged
everybody that wanted to, to fly. You know, some people don't want to fly and
they weren't stigmatized for that. But it became a pretty routine thing and
actually worked really well. The biologist--
Well, they started off getting some surplus military planes after World War II and
they weren't entirely satisfactory. And then oh, about 19, late 50's they started
getting Piper Pacers and Piper Pacer was a post war airplane, extremely well
built. ut it, there again speed was something that would appeal to people so it
was designed to, they shortened the wings I guess to make it fly faster so it's
performance on skies and floats was, was not all that great.
But we used Pacers for a number of years and they were really good airplanes. I
don't know, there must have been 10 or 15 of those purchased and then, what in
the beginning around 1960, the Cessna 180 showed up and that was better yet
although it wasn't, the 180, the Cessna's are not as good a cold weather
airplane.
The Pacer was neat, we used to heat those with a plumbers fire pot. I don't think
anybody nowadays knows what a plumber's fire pot is. There was a, you know,
back then plumbing sewer pipe was joined with a lead seal and plumbers had
this little stove that they'd melt lead on for sealing up these pipe joints. And going
back to the thirties the pilots in Fairbanks had determined that you could put a
little engine cover, a tent arrangement over your engine and put a fire pot under
it.
If you didn't burn the plane up in due course it would get warm and you could
start the engine. And then there was some tricks developed to prevent the thing
from burning up. We would at night instead of just switching off the engine you
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would switch off the fuel switch and then run the engine until it cleared the
gasoline pretty much out of the carburetor. And the, you know the parts and the
engine and then we'd always drain the oil out of it. And they designed quick
drains so that you could put an oil can under there and get the warm oil out and
then we'd take that to bed with you, take it in the house or where ever you were --
Well, actually the arctic wildlife range is not big waterfowl habitat so we never
had any survey areas there. And there are waterfowl along the coast there but as
a, it's not a waterfowl area so I never did do much work there. But going back to
when I was a game agent we did go up there and look for caribou and things but
in recent years the waterfowl people have been much more interested in the
national petroleum reserve further west which is just now beginning to be
developed for oil. So, I can't say a whole lot about the arctic wildlife refuge; it's a
splendid area.
Well, of course there's sort of a, a lot of macho folk tales that seem to emerge
from Alaska. And you hear people interviewing pilots and the first thing they want
to know about is the accidents and maybe want to know if there were any babies
born in your airplane. Things like that entered the image of Alaska pilots but as
far as we were concerned that wasn't the part of it, the.
We had good airplanes and this aircraft division that they set up in Anchorage,
Roads, it was Road's dream, but it was a guy named Theron Smith’s ability that
put together an operation that the airplanes were in really good shape. We had
some mechanical problems but we didn't have the sort of things that come from
careless maintenance like instantaneous engine failures and that sort of thing,
engines flying apart. We'd have engines that would have troubles but usually
they would start running rough and you'd get somewhere where you'd could get
something done about it and so we really quite worrying about engine failures in
that sense and--
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Yeah, by the time I came along there were what were called world aeronautical
charts, wac charts. And they're 16 miles to the inch and they got pretty good
contours. And you know, because of the way Alaska's laid out, you've got all
these big mountain areas and then river valleys between and even going back to
the 30's, when the pilots were learning to fly around without any maps, there is
kind of a pattern to the country that you could follow and get around.
And then there are passes in the, in the big mountains that are rivers. We spent
a lot of time following rivers if the weather would be bad you know, if you could
get on the Yukon or the Tannana or the Cyacook you can follow the river and it
was, it was you know sort of a, I don't know, it was a little bit of a sort of, I used to
say I fly like a lark in the woods. You learn a little bit about the country and the
weather and you use those to your advantage. Now, everything is instrumental
and you don't need to learn the country as long as all of your instruments are
working.
Well, you know in the wintertime we always carried equipment to warm the
airplane up but also tents and sleeping bags so that we could, and food, so that
we could stop if we got in bad weather. And after the, after I got into the full time
waterfowl work, I wasn't flying in the winter much anymore. But these amphib
float planes that we wound up using for waterfowl work, we'd always carry, and
Bruce does today, tents and sleeping bags and a box of food as well as oh, some
emergency rations if you smash the airplane all up.
But nobody ever has smashed an airplane all up and that's one of the intriguing
things that's never really been analyzed, but for some reason now and in over 50
years, of this low level transect flying for ducks, there's never been a fatality
connected with that.
And you know, you're breaking some of the conventional theories about flying
where speed and altitude are supposed to provide safety and here the waterfowl
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biologists cruising around low and slow and that's not supposed to be right but
the safety record for the both here but in Canada and in the prairie states where
they run these things. There's been a few oh, wheels up landings and minor
fender bender type accidents, but I don't know of anybody that has ever been
hurt of that group of pilot biologists and that applied to oh, the refuge people in
Alaska as well.
Well, we've talked about it some you know, the Fish and Wildlife pilots talk about
it some--
The safety record is good but it doesn't apply clear across the board in the Fish
and Wildlife Service because there are some professional pilots and Clarence
Road was one who have had fatal accidents in larger airplanes. Roads flew for
airlines during World War II and well he was top of the line for professional pilots
at that time. And there was another Grumman goose lost in Southeast with a
bunch of fishery biologists, cracked up in the woods. And then after OAS came
along there were some serious accidents with OAS pilots.
And then there was one refuge fatality with a guy that had, he was a military pilot,
ex-military pilot that had been working for just a month or so and he cracked up
in the Brooks terrain and killed himself and a state biologist. So and
When OAS came along, this was, you know the Fish and Wildlife, has it's own
aircraft division and then it was transferred to this interior department thing and
they worked out a, you know their own bookkeeping. And OAS doesn't have any
accidents. If there's an accident then it's attributed to the agency that was paying
for the trip so some of their pilots have banged up planes and killed Fish and
Wildlife people. And it's a Fish and Wildlife accident you know, that's the way the
record is. And so this business of the pilot biologist not killing themselves or their
passengers is sort of buried in the record book but it's a true thing and I think
maybe actually flying around low the way we do, you learn to get a feel of the
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country better and you're watching the weather in a different way then people
flying higher. One of the things that happens to the ones that stay way up in the
air is suddenly they get a low ceiling and have to come down lower and every
thing looks different and we're always low so if we get a low ceiling we don't even
notice.
Well, I started initially flying in a Pacer, Piper Pacer which is a four place engine.
And I think it was hoped that it would be a business airplane because they
shortened the wings and made it go a little faster. The Service was the refuge
people, particularly were using Super Cubs as well and the predator control
people but we were using the Pacer and it had a range of four hours and forty
minutes.
And we flew those all over but on floats for things like long trips. Course you had
to land in the water where ever it was and at that time in all the villages in Alaska
you could buy gasoline in ten gallon, five gallon cans. Two five gallon cans came
in a wooden box and so, and those boxes and the cans where valuable material
but we spent an awful lot of time carrying boxes and cans down to river banks.
And a lot of time in the evening looking for places to tie the plane to in case the
wind came up. And that was a big aspect of operating on floats, in some places
they had barreled gas and we'd roll these barrels for half a mile to get them down
the river bank and that was a good part of your day when I first started doing
surveys
And actually another problem with the floats was the duck surveys come
immediately after breakup in the spring, so not all the ice is gone and places are
short of gas. They haven't had their first supply boat of the spring yet. So, we
had to contend with all of that.
You know, Hank Hanson and I landed at Anvick one time with about a half hours
gas in the tank. We thought we were nearly out and the guy at the store said
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well, it would be about 10 days before we could fill up. This when he was
expecting his first supply. And we were standing around in the store debating
this deal and what to do and couldn't think we had enough gas to get anywhere.
And people came in, Anvick's not a very big community, and here were a couple
of strangers in town so everybody had to come look and finally some old guy said
well, he had found this barrel of gas floating down the river and he didn't know
whether he ought to put it in his boat because it was, said aviation on it.
And so Hank assured him that it would be terrible for his boat but, that he could
help him out and give him enough money for his barrel to, to replace the, so he
bought that for a good deal more then the replacement cost but things like that
would happen.
Then, we used to go into the inlet cleat and they'd always be out of gas so Hank
set up the deal when he'd come in in the spring he's buy enough gas and pay for
it for the next spring and they'd keep his gas there all for him and the whole
town'd be out and that worked. It was interesting that they never let him down on
that.
I described how operating on straight floats was awkward and then this was
another one of the Dave Spencer innovations. The Eddo float company came
out with the first set of amphibious floats with retractable wheels. And the floats
and he ordered one of those for the refuge, the Kenai refuge and nobody liked to
fly it. It took a long run to get it in the air and it, it wouldn't climb and I learned
much later that this was a function of the center of gravity being too low. You
know, pilots worry about fore and aft center of gravity but engineers know about
vertical center of gravity and if it's too low you can't pull the nose up and climb,
you just pull the nose up and it mushes.
So, that was what this plane did but it, as long as it was in level flight it was fine
and I tried that out and I was making all these stops for my survey route and hey,
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that was just the deal, no more looking for tie downs on the river bank or packing
boxes of gas around. I could pull up to the gas pump and tie up at the, on the
ramp there and it would, it would save one or two hours a day out of a survey
day.
And so it was kind of neat because then suddenly I had exclusive use of one
airplane and I could leave my stuff in it. You know, that aircraft division operated
like a motor pool and the planes people thought were good were in demand and
so you always had to take your stuff out and what not. I can, I could keep this
amphib and it was, oh, there were some other peculiar things with it. The, there
was electrical switches in these floats that didn't always work and sometimes I
couldn't get them down to land on the airport and I'd have to find some water and
go down and shake the switches. And one time I got them, one side up and the
other side down and I finally had to land it that way at the airport at Bethel.
But by in large it was a good airplane for me because I didn't want to climb. I was
staying low and I didn't need to go into short lakes, I could land in rivers and I
used to.
They were using these World War II bombers to carry loads of water out for
forest fires in those days and they'd put too much load in them and they'd take off
there in Fairbanks and be about a hundred feet in the air at the end a three
thousand foot runway and I used to say the only plane that cross the far end of
the runway lower then I do is those Boray bombers called them because I
couldn't get the 180 up with that. so I used that for a while and I liked that
airplane and then they started getting 185's and one 185 was just enough bigger
of an airplane that it could carry these floats better and you had good rate of
climb and a little better speed and good take off performance and I used a 185
for a while. They were kind of the standard and then the Service got Beavers
with amphibious floats. And they're a bigger airplane and a good deal more
rugged so you didn't break little things on them.
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I don't think I ever took a Cessna in for a hundred hour inspection that the door
latches were damaged and little things like that that didn't really effect the
operation of the airplane. But they would, things would happen to those Cessnas
and there were springs on the rudder pedals, I broke one of those springs in
Bethel one year and so I flew it for a week or so and I had to keep about 10
pound pressure on one side of the rudder petals to fly straight but that sort of
thing didn't happen much with the Beavers, they were just, just better built.
They're built in Canada.
So, they were great airplanes and then this Theron Smith who, he spent a lot of
time flying in Grummans. The Grumman goose was a really great airplane that
was designed during or used a lot in World War II by the Navy, twin engine
amphibious airplane. And they used them, the Coast Guard used them for
rescues and, so they were good for sea mammal surveys and fisheries patrols
and that sort of thing but they had some limitations too.
And this Tharen Smith was a bit of a dreamer and he wanted an amphibious
airplane that would fly about 12 hours and carry biologists and in order to
accommodate the biologists, the Grummans were usually a two pilot airplane and
they would fly them on instruments. And so that meant the two front seats were
occupied by the pilots and the biologist that might be paying for the trip had to sit
behind and some of the.
Carl Kennyon used to do sea otter surveys in the Aleutians and he's always be
needling Smith about having to sit in the back and then he used a DC-3 for that
survey so Kennyon would be perched on a bar stool in an isle looking out the
front window. So, there was a lot of good natured banter on that but Smith was
storing this all away and he designed this modified Grumman that he actually
described this to a Senator who he was taking for a ride, a female Senator her,
Congressman she was Interior or Committee Chair Julia Butler Hanson.
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I think her name is still around but Smitty in some way charmed her and she
came up with money enough for him to modify his Grumman. So, he stretched it
out a little and put a couple of seats behind the pilot and co-pilot so he could
have a couple of biologists in there with pilot quality visibility and added another
six or eight hours of fuel capacity. And put these Garrett turbine engines in the
thing and just designed the best airplane for these Aleutian Island sea mammal
surveys and that sort of thing and it was a very successful airplane.
OAS didn't like it because it didn't fit their pattern and they finally sold it but at this
point they were developing the Garrett air research engine and decided to put
one in a beaver. And so they took an Army surplus Beaver and stretched it a little
bit, added tanks. These turbine engines use more fuel per hour then a piston
engine so they made a seven hour airplane out of the turbine engine mounted
Beaver.
And that became, they tried it with some of the other projects but it turned out
that it was more useful for waterfowl work then anything else. And Beavers are
heavy if you're using them, no, if you're not using them for rather heavy work or
long distance stuff they're more airplane then you need.
The Cessnas are better. If you're batting around in small areas where you don't
need a lot range but for these waterfowl surveys the seven hour range was neat.
The ability to, you know you can't really sit in an airplane and count ducks for
seven hours but with the amphibious floats you could stop and we'd always have
a picnic on the tundra somewhere on these long survey days.
And then have a full set of gear so if the weather gets bad you can land and
camp comfortably and we usually had a good time when we'd get stuck some
lake that we hadn't landed on before and camp. And you know, walk around and
learn a little bit about a new area and the same was true for lunch stops. You
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know, you always learn something when you stop at a strange lake that you've
never landed at before. And the birds around and animals around and it was part
of understanding the country I think was, was just. You look at the bottom you
know, sometimes you get stuck on it and you had to turn the airplane around so
you've got to feel for the bank and find a parking place and just having a little
experience in the country that taught you something about it that you wouldn't
have thought of if you were just looking out the window or well.
Then this turbine had another nice characteristics with this regard in that it has a
reversible prop so instead of getting out and fiddling around with your airplane
when you pull up to the bank, you just put it in reverse and back off.. If you
anticipate your landing you can turn around and back in and so you're ready to
go.
So, that was another kind of a break through for waterfowl surveys. It flies a little
faster, a little farther, you get a little more done in a given day with less
expenditure of time and effort. And, and though we couldn't do the kind of
surveys that are being done today with a Pacer on floats to just, you get two or
three times the productivity out of a day that you would with using a little plane
like we started out with.
So, now that, that turbine Beaver that was kind of an experimental thing to start
with has been modified some since and rebuilt and Bruce Connet takes it to
Mexico every winter for winter surveys and then it made something like four trips
to Siberia.
It was the first float plane they'd ever seen in that part of the world because most
float planes burn gasoline and in Russia they use these big turbine helicopters to
get around the country and they burn jet fuel so here was a float plane that burns
jet fuel so it could operate in Siberia where none of the other American float
planes can do that. And so, and now they've got it loaded with modern
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electronics GPS for navigation and moving map thing that you don't have to carry
a paper chart anymore, you've got a little video screen and you can, the map
keeps moving and little dot, where it shows you where you're at and you don't
have to look out the window anymore.
Well, the turbine Beaver is is really good and it's been extensively modified really
from a standard Beaver. Another aspect of that you know, the turbine Beaver
was that they, they stretched the fuselage and added much better windows. The
turbine engine is smaller then the big radial engine. And instead of building a big
photogenic cowling on the front they put it in a narrow cowling which means that
you can look out and see the toe of the floats ahead.
And and just has way better visibility and one of the things I always did, we were
all the time out, I was doing these surveys we'd use, put our data on a tape
recorder, a voice recorder and I'd bring these things back and transcribe the data
off them. And oh, we'd do that at night and for a number of years I was just a one
man project ,so I'd, I'd have to find somebody to be my observer every year.
And had a long series of different people but I saved all these tapes and then
after Bruce Connet took over the project some years later, he and his assistant
Jack Hodges got some money and they took all these tapes going back to the
50's and had a guy sit down and re-transcribe them and the way we did it in the
past .And the way most of the other survey data is done, both sides record on the
same data sheet and so individual differences are lost.
And what Bruce and Jack Hodges did they re-transcribed all these tapes and
separated them and then did computerized it and did some comparisons
between myself and all the different observers I'd had. And then between the
later crews and what they learned out of all of this was that there hadn't been
much. It didn't seem to hurt to change observers, that there'd be a rough day or
two to start and then after a few days of duck survey both sides would be up to
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speed and that would go on in good shape but the one thing that really did
change was there was a sudden jump in the numbers of ducks in Alaska when
this turbine Beaver with bigger windows came on the job.
Well, the aspect that I mentioned about the improvement in the number of ducks
that a person can record out of an airplane depending on the size of the
windows. So any airplane that was designed for particularly waterfowl where it
should feature big windows on both sides.
You know, we’ve used that turbine Beaver for eagle surveys too, well that’s an
entirely different ball game. We’re, instead of flying straight lines here following
shore lines and the observer on the right is making observations and recording
locations and that puts the pilot on the opposite side from the shoreline he’s
following and in this case you need good visibility from the left seat on the right
side and the turbine beaver is pretty good. Lots of airplanes you can’t really do
that because you can’t, you don’t have the visibility to the right.
So, it might be that the windows could be even improved some if they were
designed you know, starting from scratch to build an airplane to give an even
better visibility and less you know blind spots. Every post and every contour of
the panel are blind spots when you’re looking out. So, developing that kind of
visibility is important to wildlife flying but evidently is not important to most pilots,
all they want to see is sufficient runway to land and enough visibility to see if
there’s other airplanes that are, might be a conflict with.
Well, you know, as I was talking earlier, for the waterfowl surveys you really don’t
need to go into little lakes, if you’re hunting sheep or things like that, going into
high elevation lakes to pack out loads of meat that’s a whole different scheme of
things. But using pretty good sized lakes, when we used those airplanes a lot for
banding ducks as well and hauling banding equipment but there again we’re
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always using lakes with plenty of space. There was no need to go into little
places.
So, that’s not so critical ,if you could, a more efficient engine would be a help so
that you were burning less fuel. And I think that turbine engine that the beaver
has now that’s got more power then you use. The Beaver airframe is restricted
to 121 miles per hour and you know, that engine would probably pull it at 300
miles an hour but you’re not allowed to do that it might, the engine might go off
by itself at such speeds, leave you hanging there. So, a smaller engine using
less fuel.
Using a lot of fuel is, you know it takes time to put it in for one thing and here, up
there on the wing, fiddling around when one of the things. I asked the aircraft
division for one time was some handles up on top of the wing. Cause you, you
know a lot of times it’s a nice day and you climb up there to fill your tanks and it’s
fine.
But I remember one time I was filling up at a dock in Katchacan and there was a
filler way out on the end of the wing on a standard Beaver and I was out there
eight feet above the water filling the tank and a sand boat came by making a
three foot wake and that wing started to go up and down about I don’t know, it
must have been about 10 feet and all I had was a, was a gas filler hole to stick a
couple of fingers in. I felt fairly vulnerable out there.
So, Jerry Lawhorn, he did put a couple of posts, called them goat ears or
something on top of the wing that I could hang onto and we used those for a
while and then they decided it was, I thought they were great but they did more
study of it and determined that this was causing a little flutter on the tail. I hadn’t
noticed that but so, they had to take those off.
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But, anything you can do to the airplane to make it easier to service you know,
like airline pilots or even most fix based charter operators, we were always
fueling our own planes and adding oil and that sort of thing. So if that can be
simplified, it just saves you time.
Another aspect of this is you know, a big airplane is, is a pretty complex machine
and there’s a whole lot going on inside of those engines with the controls and
everything and the simpler you can get those controls the easier it is for the pilot
to spend his time looking out the window instead of manipulating things. And that
was one of the things we didn’t like about the standard Beaver with the radial
engine that if you’re going to change your power setting you had to move the
throttle lever and then you had to adjust the mixer control, the carburetor
temperature and you had about three or four things to do.
So, you are doing that and you’re not looking out the window. Well, the turbine
Beaver is better, a lot better. You just had one lever and so you could be looking
out the window and add a little power without studying the panel.
Well I would say basically waterfowl management in North America in the 50
years, I’ve been associated with it is pretty successful. The, you know, coming
out of the dust bowl era, there was a lot of discouragement about waterfowl and
you can see it in their reports and literature and even things like I talked about
earlier where Spencer Smith said we’ve got to get every acre we can.
And if you look at the total figures now the duck numbers are in total continent
wide about the same as they were in the 50’s. There’s been some ups and
downs and some periods of worry. So, basically the things the Service is doing
and the things you know other contributors like Ducks Unlimited are working and
seem to be. But there are some places that are causes for concern.
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In Alaska, the geese on the Yukon delta took a big dive and there are some
provisions that the Service has made. It’s a difficult thing because it’s all
wrapped up in cultural aspects of the native community there but bit by bit they’re
getting the Upic Eskimos to recognize that they need to contribute too or we’re
going to lose some of these stocks. But there is a lot of vacant habitat for geese
in western Alaska that was a lot more areas that were occupied by the first bird
reporters.
So, that was one thing that’s down and I think the Service has done a good job
but I don’t see an objective to return to the level of abundance that the early
people found. They’ve set some numbers objectives and I suppose when those
become accomplished maybe they can be raised and eventually geese
reestablished in some of these areas that are now vacant.
So, that’s one area of concern and I guess the other one would be the well
another goose area that’s a matter of concern is the Copper River delta and the
dusky Canada geese which that area was up lifted six feet by the earthquake in
1964 and it changed the whole hydrology of the area and changed the way
predators had access to the goose nesting areas so there’s that problem but also
they go to a very limited wintering area in the Walamet valley so that’s an area
that is a matter of concern.
And then with the ducks, the ducks seem to being doing well in Alaska, the
dabbling ducks, some of the diving duck species are going down, some of it may
be just normal fluctuations. The oldsquaw duck, which has recently been re-christened
the long tail, duck numbers are going down and nobody’s quite sure.
There because they’re not a big species in the hunting bag and they don’t occupy
habitat that seems to be damaged much. But the Service is starting to do some
research on the diving ducks and that’s good and ascrotis is another species
that’s getting some attention for the first time you know,
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It used to be the hunters weren’t returning the bands there was no need to pay
any attention to them and then we got two species of eiders that are on our
threatened list but are fairly abundant in Siberia, the stellar eider and the
spectacle eider. And it seems to be turning out that one of the serious things that
happened to those species, they used to be quite abundant.
When I was refuge manager on the Yukon delta, I didn’t have any trouble finding
both those species. to take pictures of the females on their nests and I got
pictures of, the females aren’t very spectacular but the males are. And I could,
you know that was one of the things I was trying to take pictures of and then a
period came along where people going out there just didn’t find them and so they
were put on the threatened list and actually as a result of my petition.
That’s the kind of thing you can do after you retire and that resulted in more
money for eider studies, there was nobody looking at them and one of the things
they found was that the eiders are picking up a lot of lead out there in those
ponds where they nest and were suffering from lead poisoning and I don’t think
the natives have paid much attention to the lead shot, steel shot thing until that
came up but they’re learning about that and some of them are responding and
you know those are things that take time and I think the, a lot of the natives out
there are well, working on these things too, now to try and get the lead out and
it’s a problem. For some reason you know, there is always this theory that well, if
you shot lead into the mud or into ponds with a mud bottom the, it would
eventually go out of reach for the birds, I think there’s more questioning now then
there used to be on that score but these ponds on the Yukon delta freeze solid,
the whole works, the water and the mud and everything and I guess there’s some
evidence that you know, like the fields in New England, the frost keeps bringing
things up instead of letting them settle down and so they’re not seeing it
disappear so the eiders are a matter of concern and it’s going to take some time
to resolve the hunting problems out there on the coast where there’s a strong
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tradition for summer and spring waterfowl hunting. It’s not a matter of nutrition
anymore which may have been but I always think it would be like telling the rest
of us that we couldn’t have Christmas trees anymore you know, and we’d figure
out ways to, it would take a long time to, for us to get used to not having
Christmas trees. Some people would go on with it right away and others would
try and sneak a tree in. So that’s what’s going on out there now and it’s just
taking time.
Oh, I think it’s enormously important and –
The aerial survey thing, before you know, the flyway biologist concept went back
to the dust bowl days when ducks were really disappearing and you read these
stories from John Lynch and some of those other people that were trying to figure
out what was going on and, and they had permission to ride in military aircraft
and they had a terrible time trying to talk military pilots into flying low and slow
and that didn’t work, it just wasn’t (cough) and they tried to do surveys in the
prairies from railroad trains, they couldn’t do them from roads because in the
spring when they needed to be in there looking at duck production the roads
were all muddy and they’d just get stuck and wouldn’t get any surveys done but
they could go down the railroad tracks and they’d try riding the passenger trains
and somebody finally decided they could do better if they could get permission to
ride in the caboose of the freight trains which went slower and had better visibility
and all these things were tried but it wasn’t until they started using airplanes after
World War II in some cases ex-military pilots but some of the other guys got a
few hours flying in a supercub or Cub then and like, John Lynch and started
flying there you know, and before the airplane thing came by you know the
regulations were set on the basis of, of winter inventories and a lot of that was
pretty superficial without aircraft and when the airplanes came they then began to
do a winter inventory which continues to this day but was really needed was, if
you look at them in the winter they got tough weather to deal with and a spring
migration so if you really want to put some precision in this thing you ought to
33
know how many birds survived to get back on their nesting grounds and then
take a look and see what their productivity rate is, like how many ducklings they
produce because some years even if they get back the weather’s bad or the
habitat is too dry (cough) or something’s the matter and you get poor production.
So, if you can figure out the production and the, a factor for the number that
came back then you really can’t do it. It’s not a census in that sense. What
you’d learn is whether numbers are better then last year or worse and you know,
these surveys are so consistent now with airplanes that predictions that you get
10% more are valid. It comes at the time you need it and then the regulatory
process is kind of a mad scramble to analyze data and set regulations that will
give you the level of kill that you think you can stand and you then get them
printed and out to hunters before the duck season starts so, really it’s a grand
production and it seems to work.
Yeah, well, it was recognized first the need to have good information in the spring
and different methods were tried to achieve that and it wasn’t till enough people,
enough biologists got flying and they discovered that they could generate the
broad scale, you know contin, continent wide level of information that became
effective in, in you know, predicting what birds were going to be on the hunting
grounds and how many of them you should take and then the other thing that
happens is all this information is recorded and of course it was recorded in files
initially but it’s now all well computerized. Every year you know, it’s an art
predicting these things even with the information but now with 50 years of
experience behind that all adds to the picture as well and the people at the ducks
can say oh, well this is the year it looked like 1965 and that year we did thus and
so and we killed a little more then we should so you know, you get that kind of
experience or maybe we could have killed more that year so, it’s still sort of an
art but it’s improving with experience and will continue to improve I’m sure but the
basic system since the airplanes came in really hasn’t changed much, a few
adjustments here and there and one of the interesting aspects of the sampling
procedure is that it violates some rules randomness that bothers statisticians and
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it, it has to be sort of a trade off between randomness and the practical aspects
of flying the airplane and how you can get out there and do things effectively and
efficiently at a reasonable cost and then there’s the human aspect of just
recording visual information as, you know, it’s not as good as, as what having a
photograph or some permanent record so those things have bothered people
and they talk about bias and this thing and there have been a number of, or
several detailed studies that have determined that even though there are biases
of this nature, it works and various professionals have criticized the thing and
probably will continue to, in the mean time it’s working. I guess that’s what I
wanted to say and the critics are looking at pieces to the whole picture, the whole
thing works and it works because of the combination of, of aerial you know,
aircraft equipment and the experience of the people doing the flying. There isn’t,
you can’t talk air survey in collage and get a degree in it. It’s something that’s,
and you really can’t, there isn’t a cookbook for it. It’s something that’s passed
from experienced pilots to new pilots and it’s working.
Well, I don’t see any substitute for the –
Well, the, the aviation, the airplanes are essential to, to getting the kind of
information that’s necessary for managing waterfowl and another aspect of it is
you know, you’re using the medium the birds do, that’s important in
understanding what they’re faced with and how their year is going and so I don’t
see any substitute for using airplanes. About airplanes in the future, well, the
basic single engine high wing, there is a lot of low wing airplanes on the market
and they’re of course useless for this sort of thing. You have to have the wing
above so you can look down and most of those planes were designed in the
1930’s, the basic aeronautics and some of them like the Beaver was in the
1940’s I guess, like the turbine Beaver that we’ve been talking about has a
plaque in it with a manufacturer date of 1952 and you know, what, what I often
think of people get quite excited when they see a nice 1952 model automobile on
the street, think oh, that’s a real antique. They don’t think that with airplanes but
35
there’s been tremendous oh, innovation with regard to materials and engines and
power plants and at some point I think they’ll be a lot of improvements that we
don’t necessarily envision now like you know airplanes that are riveted together
with pieces of aluminum to a major degree. There are going to be lighter
materials that are maybe stronger and if you get a –
Well of course, I think the flyway biologists have always had cameras and –
Flyway biologists have always had cameras and taken pictures and been
interested in photography and in a few cases it’s been useful, like particularly
with snow geese because you’ve got good contrast between the background.
We tried endlessly to take pictures of blank brant at Eisenbeck lagoon though
and you don’t have the contrast there so even if you had some kind of a
computer sensor you probably wouldn’t, wouldn’t get it. The infrared doesn’t
work on brant because they’re so efficiently feathered that they don’t loose heat
and you know, snow can fall on their backs and it won’t melt and they’re just not
registering on infrared so, and then people have tried to oh, use movies and
other gadgetry but to a certain extent you wind up with a pile of film that takes
more time to analyze then, then you know, just a bunch of stuff. So, for the time
being anyway I don’t see a, a photograph substituting for visual. You know, they
say that the computer that thinks better then the man will be here one of these
days but it’s not yet. I guess they do have computers that will count little blips if
you can get the proper contrast or whatever but, it’s not here. It’s not on the
horizon I don’t think.
Well, David Spencer you know, was one of the pioneers in the prairies, he didn’t
stay there very long but he, he was a key in developing the transect survey
techniques that we use today almost un-modified even though he did it with a
pencil and a pad of lined paper and now it’s done with voice recorders and
computers but the technique has lent itself to you know, being dealt with by a
modern technology and the basic observations are the same. So, Spencer was
36
extremely important and he was in Alaska, he, there was a couple of things about
Spencer. He had this background prior to World War II he was in the refuge
system I think in Florida somewhere but he spent a year in Wisconsin studying
under Aldo Leopald and he worked on some projects with Olis Murie in Wyoming
and when he came to Alaska people were still thinking in terms of how to get a
sustained yield out of reindeer and out of fur bearers and you know, controlling
wolves was one of the techniques that was used for conservation work and, and
there was still a major effort to get rid of the keen-eye moose range and the
kodiak, the keen-eye was in demand for home steaders and the kodiak refuge
was in demand for cattle ranchers and the he was the first wave of biologists that
weren’t, the game agents were, were really thinking about preventing you know,
law violations and developing regulations, hunting regulations and trapping
regulations and, and I didn’t realize this at the time but Spencer was the first one
that had the sense of wilderness that you know, he was there when it was
emerging amongst Leopold and his students and his associates and so he
brought that to Alaska and I think a lot of the refuges were administrative order
refuges which can be reversed by another administrator and in fact that was what
had happened to the first I think they called it a sanctuary on the Yukon delta set
up by Teddy Roosevelt that was abolished by Warren Harding in his wisdom.
We don’t know much about that. It would be fun to dig up the records on that.
But, anyway Spencer was important in the, you know, we brag about our
wilderness in Alaska that’s going to be there in putuety and I think he deserves
the credit for getting the agency as well as the other people in Alaska thinking in
terms of the value of wilderness and that we need to, needed to do it now rather
then think you know, there was quite a strong feeling oh, Alaska’s safe we need
to put our money in our effort down south where all the people are tearing things
up and he did these first pioneering waterfowl survey then the next, well,
Clarence Road was important with his attitude towards flying and that we should
all learn to fly government airplanes if we wanted to and he really encouraged
that and he got the money, he got it from Albert Day who was the Director that
really, he had very good rapport with Day and we hear stories about how the
37
other regional directors were pretty irritated with Roads cause he got everything
he wanted and they all had to struggle for what they needed but I don’t know
whether that’s true or not but in any event Roads was important in encouraging
the flying and then bringing Hank Hanson who sort of built on some of the early
work Dave Spencer had done and he set up a program for not only doing the
duck surveys, Hank Hanson started the studies on trumpeter swans. He tried to
get a little banding project in each one of these valleys that in most cases are
now national wildlife refuges and find out where those birds, you know who was
using them and he set this thing in motion and then I followed Hank Hanson and
pretty well, I built some on what he’d been doing but I didn’t go in like so often
happens when project leaders change and make a new start. I liked the work
he’d done and I worked with Hanson quite a bit before he left doing banding and
doing surveys and then Bruce Colnut came to work for me. He worked for me for
about five years before I retired. I did the waterfowl project for 20 years and then
Bruce has now been there for over 20 years and he’s built on the Hank Hanson
program and there’s more money in the, most of the time until Bruce came along,
I was a one man project and then I had Bruce for five years. Now there are three
of them in the waterfowl project and Jack Hodges was the second one and he’s a
guy with a wildlife degree and a biometrics advanced degree and a good grasp of
computer programming and when I left the project in 1983 the Service was using
main frame computers in Alaska and had some in Anchorage but that stuff was
still kind of on the horizon and I worked pretty hard with computer programmers
in Anchorage trying to get oh, things like the swan data computerized and it was
really hard working with a computer programmer that didn’t know anything about
wildlife. The thing that bothered me was they always wanted to change the data
so that it would fit into their computer better. I’d have to think, well what are we
doing this for anyway and I didn’t, I didn’t get very far with that. Well then Jack
Hodges came along working for Bruce Connie and he was able to, he’s a pilot
too, he flies the turbine Beaver and knew how to write the programs to handle the
data that was useful to the, that was easy for the pilots to manage as well as
being, meet the standards of the migratory bird station here and he just came up
38
with all sorts of good innovative stuff and the desktop computers were coming
out then so that all has happened since you know, I was still essentially with a
pencil when I retired and now they’ve got really good computer capability and
one of the things that’s exciting to me I guess I mentioned this before is that so
much of the data that I’d stored away in the files but never had a, a chance to
completely work up Bruce Conin and Jack Hodges and they have a young lady
there Dever Groves and they’ve been able to archive this old data and it’s
comparable with newer stuff and have turned out a lot of really good publications
and papers and taken what was sub-grade literature and added it to the literature
of, you know, of the peer reviewed literature of waterfowl science. So, what
you’ve got is in Alaska a waterfowl program starting in 1956 to 2001 with very
strong continuity and that's actually pretty rare in the government I think and kind
of exciting and it was exciting to be part of that and Bruce is not to far from
retiring now so whether it will keep going or not well, who knows but so far so
good it's almost 50 years and it's set a good record.
Bob may have some other comments on that. This might be worth. Alaska's a
long way from Washington DC and the Patuxant and because of the you know ,
Juneau's a long way from Anchorage and I think we had a level of freedom that,
it's disappearing now but we could attack things that --
In Alaska we had the freedom to innovate I think, partly it was an aspect of a
small number of people a long ways from kind of the establishment. Oh, I think
the way Jack Hodges has developed his own computer programs is an aspect of
that. He just did it and oh, we got into other areas. We got into things I got
involved with eagle surveys. I don't think anybody down here is doing, you know,
the waterfowl biologists--
(I had to turn the tape over so I missed some)
39
--- where there's an eagle nest every half mile on an average for hundreds of
miles of coast and the game agent that I worked with in Juneau was watching
this and nobody had any concept of how many eagles or where they were until
we got out with the airplane and started plotting them and went to the forest
service and said how can you allow these loggers to cut all these eagle trees
when, showed them the bald eagle act and you know, allowing a law violations
here and that resulted in a good program to protect eagle trees in the Tongas
forest and we got involved with the, you know, I did some of the first sea bird
surveys with an airplane because here was a oil industry talking about drilling for
oil and they did in Cook inlet and at that time you know they were in the wild and
woollies of Alaska and everything they didn't need went over the side and the
Fish and Wildlife guys brought them up short on that and there were the tankers
that were coming in to Cook inlet were pumping oily bilge and killing birds and so
we all got kind of fiddling around with the sea birds and then when the oil
development became more serious suddenly there was money to, to do some,
some sea bird studies in Alaska and what they call the Auxcet program
(inaudible) continental shelf, something or other and we had a good idea then of
what we needed to do and how we could use airplanes to do it and but I did
some air surveys in Bristol bay which was on the hot list for, for oil drilling that
hasn't happened there because it's so important for fish but there were lots of
sea birds in the water but also ducks as well so I said well, I can go out there and
look at them, get some figures and I had a system of, I called it a saw tooth
survey where I'd go out eight miles and back eight miles and go down the coast
that way because most of the birds are close to shore. So, we had to freedom to
do that sort of thing so we were ready when suddenly some guy from
Washington shows up and he's got three days to write a program for doing
studies for oil development in Bristol Bay and hey, we've been there and I can't
remember that guys name. He was an interesting guy. He gathered a bunch of
people together in the regional office in Anchorage like on Wednesday and he
said I'm going back to Washington on Friday and I need to have a report on bird
studies that are needed and he talked to the Fish and Game biologists and he
40
says I need, you know what you want for, for sea mammals and one of these
guys you know, they don't want the Federal government putting any time
restraints like that on them and he said well, we can do that, it would take us
about a month and this guy says I'm going to turn in a report on the need for sea,
for sea mammals studies in that area on Monday morning and if you don't have it
to me on Friday, I'm going to write it on the airplane and but, he didn't have to
say that to the bird people because we'd kind of been sniffing around and we
knew something about where the birds were and that kind of, you know that went
back. Are you familiar with Ira Gabrilson?
He was director for 10 years, Fish and Wildlife Director and but he was a real
birder, birds was his passion and every summer that he was Director he spent a
month or two birding in Alaska and of course being Director he could command
ships and planes and cars and whatever he wanted and then he and Frederick
Lincoln who was the guy who set up the banding lab produced a monumental
book on the birds of Alaska and it was Gabrilson's observations and Lincoln's
research really you know, there's a 50 page bibliography in that book and it's
wonderful. But Gabrilson had paid attention to the, to the sea bird rookeries.
He's got on these, they had some pretty good vessels at the time for fisheries
work and, and he'd take these big boats out for bird watching, had a grand time.
So, there were good descriptions of some of the bird colonies from Gabrilson of
course, they looked up all the literature preceding and so, it was a little of
following up on you know, we did know, knew something about birds and now the
Service has a very good sea bird program as you described in your video of
monitoring sea bird colonies but none of that was going on in the, in the 60's and
70's.
Well, having the Migratory bird office for waterfowl surveys in Juneau has been a
sore spot with the people in Anchorage for a number of years. Juneau of course
in the capital of Alaska and that's where the regional headquarters was in
territorial days and then after statehood the regional office was abolished and
41
most of the people transferred and the, when I, when I came on as, as the
waterfowl position then it was called supervisor of waterfowl investigations and
what I supervised was myself mostly because people were disappearing in all
directions but it was based in Juneau and I tried to move it to Fairbanks where I
was familiar with but I was told it had to be in Juneau and I got settled there and I
just barely got settled when they started trying to move me other places but
Juneau's, my wife liked it there and it's a nice community to raise a family and I
looked at the possibilities, let's see they wanted to move me to Portland first and I
didn't want to do surveys in Alaska from a base in Portland so I managed to get
out of that and then they, several times they wanted me to come back here and
then when the regional office was established in Anchorage it's always bugged
the regional staff in anchorage that that project's in Juneau but it's a good place
for a project like that because it, there was a time when they took all the flyway
biologists out of the regional offices cause the regional directors wouldn't leave
them alone and they'd be called on to attend meetings endlessly and never
would get their surveys written up and that's another interesting aspect of the
duck survey business. The flyway biologists go out and do a survey and they
have it available, written up, analyzed and available for distribution within a week
or two and so often, in fact the norm for biologists is to go out and get a bunch of
data and work on it all winter and maybe two or three winters and there's an
awful lag between the field work and the finished paper and the flyway biologists
well, they got things in order so zap it comes right out and I don’t know of any
other project that operates under that kind of a time straint. Do you Bob?
We were free of being called on the hall for every ceremonial event in the
regional office and we had a nice office that had big windows facing down
Gastanol channel, I could see the swans going by when they were migrating and
occasionally there'd be hump back whales I could see from my office window and
any ships coming into Juneau harbor and it was a pleasant place to work. So, I
had a good office. I had a place my family liked. I had a, actually had you know,
the kind of beach property you've got to be a CEO or a agency director to be able
42
to afford around here and I got five acres on the waterfront in Juneau and so it
was a good place for my family and I just could see how I could take my family a
suburban home in Anchorage or back here somewhere and Hank Hanson came
back here before me and I remember talking to his daughter one time about, they
had lived right in downtown Juneau and she felt like she'd, she was a teenager,
she'd lost all of her freedom. She came back where she was dependent on her
parents to take her anywhere she wanted to go and in Juneau she'd been able to
walk or bike to all the things she was interested in so staying in Juneau appealed
to me and I think the same thing with Bruce and it still irritates the regional office
that we're there but I think they recognize that there's a good flow of information
comes out of that Juneau office that maybe it isn't a good idea to interrupt that.
43
Cal Lensink
5/10/01
Q Your name, and then talk about your education and your career.
Actually I started out at the McAllister college and an English Professor there
assigned us a theme on what we were going to be and directed us to the
vocational files and at that time I was in Pre-med and it was in the vocational files
that I found that there was such a thing as wildlife management and so I had to
transfer schools right away and I’ve been pretty much on one track every since. I
graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1950 and then took a year of post
grad work there and then went to the University of Alaska for my masters degree
and then from there if you don’t have a permanent job, you continue on in school
and I got a PHD from Purdue.
Q What is your employment history?
The, my earliest work was with the Minnesota Department of Conservation, one
year one summer as a, working on a fisheries research crew and the second
year on duck lakes surveys and then I worked part time in the winter and then
went, went to Alaska after that and I worked on several temporary jobs as, when
I was a student in Alaska and then in 1957 I went to work for the state of Alaska
and worked for them three years when I began working for the Fish and Wildlife
Service on the Rampart project on the Yukon flats.
Q Describe the Rampart project, what was that all about?
The Rampart project was a proposal pushed very strongly by an Alaska senator
Greening, to put a dam across the Yukon river rampart and that would have
created a, a power dam and a lake behind it of about ten thousand square miles
which would have completely inundated the Yukon flats which is the premier
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waterfowl production area in interior Alaska and fortunately the, the, the dam did
not go in and actually a lot of the information that we collected at the time of the
rampart project was used for establishing the Yukon flats as a national wildlife
refuge. So, it—
Q What did you do as far as, were you surveying?
It was, as we were talking about earlier most of our work is surveys and
censuses and that’s what it was. We were trying to establish how big the
populations were and how productive they were and we set up a series of 20
sampling plots each of four square miles which we had a census by foot and
canoe three times during the summer, once for breeding population and then
twice for broods and in total, and then we had some larger study areas in
addition to our sampling plots but in total we hit between eight and nine hundred
lakes every summer at least three times.
Q Describe what life was like there, the support systems you had and how
self sufficient you had to be, sort of just get a feel of what Alaska was like.
The, well even yet my headquarters, the summer headquarters would be in Fort
Yukon but we didn’t see much of Fort Yukon because we were camped out most
of the time. But our supply base was in Fort Yukon and this is a small Indian
village maybe at that time, three or four hundred people and most of them were
still living off the land, they trap, they hunted a few of them had summer jobs in
construction but in Fairbanks or something like that but, but really they depended
very much on subsistence living, catching fish in the Yukon river in fish wheels
and hunting and trapping and some of them were very good at trapping. Now,
much of that is gone. There are very little trapping anymore compared to what
there was then.
45
Q What was the thing that made the Rampart project not go and was the
information you gathered convincing or did it just die of it’s own self or –
I think there were two major things, first the major environmental damage that it
would cause, caused a lot of the environmental organizations to strongly oppose
it but they really beat it on shear economics rather then wildlife values. It, it the
evidence said that the environmental groups put forward on the economics of it
was pretty convincing and so the project then died and I think projects like that
don’t tend to die and stay dead but I think every year puts a further nail in it’s
coffin though now with the energy crunch that we’ve got now they want to open
the Artic wildlife range for oil exploration. I can envision them wanting to develop
electrical power out of the Yukon, a renewed Rampart project with the problems
they’ve got in California now and so it, you never quite feel those projects have
gone away for good.
Q Bob Scott hiring for waterfowl?
Yeah, they, actually the, I got the fellowship to go to the University of Alaska for
my masters but that didn’t start until fall, but I came up in, in Spring, in May and
then flew out, I first worked for a couple of weeks on the University campus to
make ends meet and then in, in June I flew surveys over much of Alaska and into
Canada with Bob Scott and then he dropped me off at Holy Cross and told me to
pick up a boat and motors and so on there that they had stored there and I was
on my own, hire an Eskimo to work for me and he said the people, it was a
missionary town at Holy Cross and he told me that the, the missionaries there
would tell me who would be good to work for me and when I talked to them there
was one person left in town that needed a job and the missionary didn’t think
very much of him and I was stuck. It turned out that I probably got the best
person in town. He was very aggressive for an Eskimo or Indian, that probably
didn’t go over big in town where there was, might have been liquor or something
like that being in the field with me if I caught six ducks he had to catch seven and
46
so we had bang up summer. He was a first rate helper all the way and in those
years we didn’t have good maps so you really depended and I always enjoyed
working with a local Indian or Eskimo that knew more about living in the wild then
I did and could get along pretty well but the map I had then was cut out from an
air navigation chart in which only the main stem river of Anoco was shown,
Anoco and Ididerod and most of the map was printed in yellow labeled tarra
incognita. They didn’t know what the country was like even at that time and in, in
the early 1950’s they started the aerial mapping of Alaska, the Air Force started
that in the early 50’s and since then the maps have improved rapidly and
continue to improve.
Q What were you doing that summer? What was the mission at hand?
It was pretty much a natural history project on waterfowl on the Anoco. How
many were there but it focused more on banding and knowing where they went
to then, then anything else. We were a little too late in the season to do much
nest8ing work and not knowing the geography well enough anyway we couldn’t
set up any sampling system and I probably wasn’t able to do it then anyway with
the education I had at that time and, and so we banded birds with basically our
only equipment was a dip net which we had to run down every bird individually
and I think we banded a little over a thousand ducks and geese that summer.
Q Were there a lot of ducks there?
There were a lot of ducks there and a lot of geese using the edge of the river and
the, the boat I had was so slow that if you were following the geese along the
shore of the river, the geese could run faster then the boat could move but we
had a very small skiff and we could take the motor off the bigger boat which was
a 16 horse Johnson, an old fashion on, put it on the little boat which was fairly
dangerous I would say and then we could catch up. It was a fun summer but it’s
47
one of the two places I found more mosquitoes then any place I’ve been in
Alaska.
Q What did you do after that summer?
Then I, of course after the summer I started work at the University of Alaska and
my Master’s thesis was on Pine Martin, a fur bearing animal and I, I always really
wanted to work on mammals and ended up working on birds most of my career
and then after I was of the longest temporary employees the Service had had, I
think I got my, my ten year pin in career status the same year and it took two
years to get career status, I had eight years of temporary time one way or
another. But jumping from one project to another just where I was needed and
while it was always a, you were always sort of low man on the totem pole as far
as the pay was going, it was really the best part of my career and able to go and
do everything all over the state on different projects and whether it was
censusing moose or then my, I, one of the projects I was on was helping on the
Allusion Island refuge on a study on sea otters and there were some professors
from Purdue on the same project and that Christmas we became friendly and
that Christmas I sent one of the Profs a Christmas card and on the card jotted
that I was thinking of going back to school and that I was going to apply to
Berkley and the University of British Columbia to see whether I could get into one
of those. I knew the Profs from both those and I got an air mail letter back saying
come to Purdue and we’ll give you a scholarship so, I went to Purdue and I think
I was probably lucky. I’m not sure I would have made the grade at Berkley or –
Q What did you study at Purdue?
I was still in wildlife management and my major project was on sea otters. I sort
of topped my bet, I, when he told me that he’d give me a scholarship I said I’d
come to Purdue if I could work on a project in Alaska and suggested sea otters
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since the Prof there knew a little bit about sea otters at least and that worked out
just fine.
Q Was there a problem with sea otters at the time?
Well, the sea otter population had, had become almost extinct about the turn of
the century and we knew that there had been some recovery in some areas and
during World War II a Navy pilot had censused just flown around Amchitka and
identified a lot of sea otters there and, and so then the refuge became interested
in and were contemplating transplant studies and so on to try to move them to
other areas of population. Alaska wide was still very, very small then and, but so
that was basically the way I got involved with that.
Q What was your work entailing locating colonies?
It was, I, I censused sea otters pretty well all through the laska where they were
and then it was just general life history, reproduction and behavior and, and but I
focused probably as much on anything as the, the history of the population. How
they had been exploited by the Russians and subsequently by, by the Americans
after the sale of Alaska and, and tried to make some estimate of how few there
had become and I thought that in Alaska the population might have dipped as
low as a couple of hundred animals and then when I was working on them, I
worked on them for several years of course and my thesis I had data up to oh,
’68 or ‘9 and I thought that by that time they had recovered to about 30,000 and,
but they, they didn’t cross between islands very rapidly. They’d build up the
population and the bigger the population would get the deeper they’d have to
forage to get food and eventually get to another, another island. The, once the
population got that big though it expanded very, very rapidly. An interesting thing
now, it’s in the Allusions Island it’s going down hill again and it’s not all together
certain what it is but it looks like it may be predation by, by Orca, killer whales
that is, is having a major impact on them right now. There’s been a very sharp
49
decline in the numbers of seal lions and seals in the north pacific so, so much so
that sea lions are threatened or endangered and, and they were the primary food
of the killer whale and the killer whale has had to substitute anything it could get
and apparently it’s getting sea otters. At any rate the population of sea otters is
going down quite sharply in the western Allusions.
Q So, where did the sea otter study lead you? What was your next focus?
That lead, lead me to actually the, I was, before I even got my PHD, I went to
work for the state as head of the predator investigation and control and then I
worked for about three years for the state when I started the Rampart project
and, and on that I had, that was a split assignment. I spent winters in Patuxent
research center in Maryland and summers on the Yukon flats working for Hank
Hanson at the time and so that, that was pretty good experience. Being at
Patuxent for three years was very good and I’ve had breaks all the way through
my career. Let’s face it, interesting projects to work on and being the right
person, the right place at the right time, like the Rampart project. I was only one
that had done really much work on waterfowl on the ground in Alaska and so I
was the natural one to go in on that.
Q Get him to tell Garvon stories.
He was a biologist working as a temporary for me on the, on the flats and –
Just Garvon would be enough. It was things happen to him and we were in a
canoe one time and the water had been very high and the grass on the end of
the lake was flooded and we were in two Indian made canoes, real narrow
canoes and the, it, it was quite deep just a little ways off shore but he didn’t
realize that because there was grass in the water and so I, he was following me
and I, I got the bow of my canoe on shore, stepped out into ankle deep water and
he saw that I was in ankle deep water in the grass and so he was still in the
50
grass so he calmly put a leg over the canoe and tipped it over and he was in five
feet of water and then one other time he, we had a plot that was sort of tough to
do and so I sent him to do just about a third of the plot in the easy part and I
didn’t expect to be back until nine o’clock but I thought he’d be done by about
four or five in the afternoon and I got back about nine o’clock at night and no
Garven and it was obvious he hadn’t been in camp and so I started out looking
for him and finally it got too dark and I had to go back to camp and then I was up
about three in the morning to track him down and I could track him to see where
his canoe went in and out of water and I actually found him, he was on his way
home, he had figured out where he was but he’d spent all night out and but he
had lost his watch and had no idea of what time it was or anything else and on
the last portage on to the home lake I was way ahead of him, being out all night
he was tired and but I was crossing the portage and there was a patch of
blueberries there and so I scooped a couple of handfuls and went on down the
lake shore and he saw that and he came by them and he said these would be
real good in pancakes. So, he wanted to stop and pick blueberries and I thought
anybody that’s been out all night wants to pick blueberries, I’ll pick blueberries
with him and so we had pancakes with blueberries that morning. But, then to
cork it off, the next year I had a kid form Canada working for me, a wildlife
student from Canada and he was on the same plot and if you couldn’t find the
lake you were heading for, you had them run compass courses through all these
ponds and you’d start climbing trees when you got anywhere near but Larry was
climbing a tree and coming down he found a watch in the tree and it was still
running and so it was Garven’s watch from the year before. I knew just who—but
here’s a tree 20 or 30 miles from the nearest village, way out in the wilderness
someplace and it was really funny.
Q Was he a native?
Garven?
51
Q Yes.
No a white man. He had a degree in wildlife management. It was, he seemed to
get in trouble all the time.
Q Were you working for the Service then?
I was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, that was part of the Rampart
project then, but that was sort of funny.
Q Did you work with Jim King?
I've worked with him but never for him. I've know him, he was a student at the
University of Alaska when I was there and then when I was at, on the split
assignment, Rampart and, and in Maryland he started as first manager of the
Yukon delta refuge which was then Clarach Road refuge and then he was there
just a year or two, a couple of years when he was offered Hank Hanson's job as
flyway biologist for Alaska and then the Rampart project was winding down and
Dave Spenser called me in Maryland and, and asked whether I wanted the
Yukon delta job and I sure did because I was either going to have to, it would get
me back to Alaska otherwise I was going to have to go full time in Maryland and
that didn't really interest me that much.
Q You went to become manager?
And then I was at Bethel for eleven years.
Q As manager?
Yeah.
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Q Describe what that was like, relationships with the native populations, how
much support you had, was it just a caretaker kind of job?
The, it's when you think of refuges now and, and even what's on the Yukon Delta
now, we had a staff of four, a maintenance man, a secretary, an assistant
manager and myself and the refuge at that time was about six and a half acres
and so we had our hands full but, and our budget was so small it was in the
seventy thousand range that the first day of the fiscal year we could have a fixed
cost for our airplane, for fuel, electricity, light and salaries and we were in the
hole, on the first day of the fiscal year and yet we ran a pretty good project out
there because I wrote Profs all around the country and, and told them that we
had, we couldn't afford temporary helper for the most part but that if they had
students to come out there that we would, we would furnish them the logistics
since our airplane was paid for and we had boats and, and that worked out really
superbly a Prof from Purdue sent some students out and Dennis Ravling from
University of California sent students out and we had a student from Canada and
so there were several masters and PHD projects that went on when I was there
and so we ended up with a really good program, really I had no wish to leave
Bethel really but the last three years I was there I was on constant detail doing
other things, other then the refuge so that the refuge program was sort of going
to pot from my point of view because a fourth of the staff was gone, that was me
and I was the one, the only one interested really in research but I had been the
detailed on the Alaska natural interest lands legislation and I was pretty much
involved in that for, for three years and I, I averaged about two hundred and
ninety days away from home, so trying to live in Bethel and, and doing the other
things is just almost impossible so in the, that was finished I,
(Tape change)
Q What politics were involved? How the refuges and the lands were divided
up. What the process, a little bit of history of how that all came about.
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The, the national interest lands in Elka I think probably had a longer history then
most people think, from my point of view at any rate but a lot of the
environmental organizations long before Elka got interested in the artic wildlife
range and, and as sort cause celebra, and, and so they had, had a large coalition
of environmental organizations that fought for that and then at the time that the
Native claim the settlement act sometime later the artic range was originally
established by Ydal who had, had blocked oil development up there until the
range was established, she set everything up as a monument and, and they
couldn't really move forward with the oil development until some of the
environmental issues were settled and in this group of organizations was still
together and so they were interested in preserving more land as refuges and
parks in Alaska. At the same time we had John Dingle who is very interested in
refuges as a whole and was interested in, in lands in Alaska as a refuge and he
requested the Service identify lands in Alaska that, that would be good as
refuges and that's the point I really came in directly. Jim Keagan and I were
mostly because we were the only ones free and could go probably and we also
had, he had flown more over Alaska and seen waterfowl and I had worked on the
ground in several locations. We're sent to Washington, DC to identify refuge
lands, land suitable for refuge in Alaska but we had absolutely no idea how, what
we were going to ask for, whether it was ten thousand acre, a hundred thousand
acres, a million acres. We had no framework, nobody in Fish and Wildlife
Service who could tell us what we were supposed to be doing but we started on
a series of briefings on what we were going to do, it was, everything in the cart
was before the horse and it was sort of funny and then John Dingle learned we
were in town to respond to his question and asked us up to come up and brief
him and during the briefing, Jim King asked Dingle, pointed out to Dingle, we had
no frame of reference. We didn't know what we were supposed to be identifying,
whether ten thousand or a million acres and, and Dingle came right back, he said
I want you to identify everything in Alaska that you'd think would be good for a
refuge and we both pointed out that was very easy to do if, if you had ten
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thousand acres to select, you'd probably take a seabird island but if you could
grab everything and we were on the floor with a map of Alaska with John Dingle
and, and we're on the floor drawing, lines around all the places in Alaska that we
thought would make good wildlife refuges and then that went into the native
claims act but not just as refuges, it was parks, refuges and everything else and
the native claims act director the secretary to select up to 80 million acres of, of
lands in Alaska that would be suitable for national parks or monuments or, and
split it up among the four systems BLM, Butmars preservation recreational areas
and I was involved in selecting then of lands and, and preparing impact
statements, environmental statements for, for the lands we selected and initially
the legislation went in dividing the land fairly evenly between BLM Parks Service,
Forest Service and Fish and Wild life Service and I 've often thought that Don
Young should get a metal for his conservation effort, he was very much opposed
to the refuge in this legislation and so when, when the Secretary of the Interior
went in for 83 million acres instead of 80 million acres he was most upset and he
put in another bill for 16 and said it be comprised someplace in between and then
the environmental organizations, much the same ones that had pushed for the
Artic wildlife range said, no it will be a compromise between anything we might
want in your 16 million and they got everything they wanted. They got about 130
million acres into the refuge and parks systems and BLM was pretty well cut out
and the forest was pretty well cut out. The original legislation I think, asked 23
million acres of refuges and we ended up with 52 million acres and it was just a
fantastic thing to be --
Q Talk about women and biology and field work.
The, there were very few in the early days. People went into wildlife
management because they like hunting or fishing and, and there were just almost
no women involved and if they were involved it was usually through a University
system like the University of Alaska had a first rate ornithologist Brina Kessel that
was employed but in must have been 1967 or 1968 one of the Profs wanted to
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send up a girl onto the refuge and, highly recommended her so I and another
Prof also wanted to bring up a girl a, a student that they'd started in wildlife and I
was perfectly happy with that and, and so they came out on the Yukon Delta and
then our regional office, we were under Portland at the time rather then the
Alaska Regional office, were so fascinated by it that they wanted a news release
of these girls working in a remote areas of Alaska, on a refuge and I sent them
the information and some pictures and it hit AP and it was all over the country. It
was just an unheard of thing as late as the late 1960's that you'd have a women
working in a remote area in a field camp. It seems strange now but it was sort of
funny because that fall I was on my way to a meeting in Florida on a plane and I
was sitting with a nice looking lady and she, we started talking and I told her I
was from Alaska and she asked whether I had heard about this women working
in the boonies of Alaska for Fish and Wildlife Service and I said yes, they work
for me. I wouldn't have dared tell her that but in my brief case I had two sheets of
slides I could haul out to show them to her and, but then shortly after that there
was really strong government involvement in equal opportunity which extended
to women as well as racial groups and when, then when I started the, the marine
bird shop in Anchorage there were, almost nobody with any experience and so I,
I hired a lot of women in that job and some of them are still working. In fact, all of
them are, that I hired are, are in the field yet and some of them in Alaska, yet but,
the we had a really nice person as a EEO officer at the time but she heard me
make some derogatory comment about EEO, that I didn't, didn't like the program
and, and of course she hadn't heard, over heard the whole conversation, she just
heard that much and so as a project leader that she didn't think was supporting
her Eeo program, she, she complained to the Regional Director and the Regional
Director told her to talk to the Assistant Regional Director who is, and, and then
called me and said sooner or later she'd be down there to see me but the
Assistant Regional Director then directed her to my boss and my boss finally sent
her to me and then she walked in the room and I had this trophy on the wall that I
got from my contribution award that I got from my contribution to EEO for hiring
so many women and minorities and, and she told me what she'd overheard and I
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said yes, I don't like the program I said all you do is hire the best people you can
get and let the chips fall where they may and they might be minorities or women
and that's what I had done basically and about half, better then half my staff at
that time was women and all of them working in the field and --
Q Talk about Hank Hansen? Saving the Spring Water puddle survey with
Hank Hansen.
Not quite sure the, Hank Hansen was continuing surveys after, after Bob Scott
had started them actually Dave Spenser had flown the earliest one and he was
followed by Bob Scott but because Spenser was actually part of the refuge
supervisor at the time and wasn't, but he had been a flyway biologist before he
came up here so he at least started some surveys in Alaska and then Bob Scott
set up surveys over most of the important waterfowl areas in the state and then
he left and, and Hank Hansen took over and he was initially flying the same
survey lines as, as Scott had set up and, and, and I was working for Hank mostly
on the ground and doing some air ground work and so on and but, we realized
that the surveys weren't a very statistically sound sampling system that, that a
small area might have as many transect lines and be sampled as heavily as a big
area and it didn't all make sense so in 1956 I think it was or before, before the
surveys were flown in 1956, Hank and I laid out all the transect lines that they're
using now and then Hank flew those for years and years and at that time he was
flying a piper pacer and on floats and which meant that you had to have gas on
lakes in any place you went and it had limited range compared to what they've
got now. It was a huge, huge job to--
Q Was the Piper an under wing plane?
No it was, the Piper they had then, the Piper Pacer was a high wing. It's, it's I
was going to say something like it's got a bigger fuselage, it's actually a four
placed plane but it's smaller wing spread and so on then a cubby did so it's sort
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of a hot little airplane but it didn't perform to well on water and, and it didn't have
range or so on. It just wasn't a very good airplane. The first really good airplane
for survey work we had was a 180 and that was, that was a fine airplane and
then from that we went to 185 and now to 206 now the turbo beaver which is
probably the best thing that ever happened to the surveys up here.
Q There's only one though.
There's only one. It's too bad we don't have a dozen of them.
Q We just did a video on trying to get a new era of, a new airplane
specifically designed for survey work.
They aught to start out with a beaver and go from there. The, the 206 is, is on
amphibious floats, the 206 from my point of view is a dog, When I talked to them
in place they land and so on I would, they just can't begin to get in and out of the
places we did with straight floats and yet nowadays to get fuel and so on you
almost have to be able to land on land and so there, there in a sense good
survey airplanes, the best available now but there is nothing really great.
Q His work for research under Dirk Durkson. Only smoking office they
tolerated because of Cal's pipe.
I had an office of my own though with windows but I smoked for years and years
and years I guess and I got the message all of the sudden, better quit. I had a
stroke in 1993, I think, that was after I retired though. I kept--
Q Dirk Durkson?
Durkson replace me, I was head of research and then I, have you ever read the
Peter Prince book and you know what percussive sublimation is? So, I was
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bounced up to where I couldn't do any damage and Dirk took over my job, so I
ended up working for Dirk, that worked out fine but it but I continued to smoke my
pipe. I, I it was almost part of me. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and
reach for my pipe.
It's still funny even yet I, I'm usually wearing a dog whistle and once in a while
you know, when you're nervous or something like that I'll have the whistle in my
mouth and reach into my pocket for a cigarette lighter.
Q How long was your career? When did you retire?
I retired in 1988 actually and but then kept my office in the Fish and Wildlife
Service for several years longer. I think in 1989 I put in a full years time working
for Fish and Wildlife service as a volunteer because for the Exxon Valdez spill I
ran all the morgues and then did a lot of right up on the, on the dead sea otters
and birds and then --
(end of side one)
--In a profession that you really like, you just, you might retire but that means you
quit getting paid and but--
Q Looking at the future of maybe, let's keep it to waterfowl, how do you,
where do you see the Service pretty much expanding in some areas, do you see
them expanding in some areas? What do you see in the evolution of the Fish
and Wildlife Service?
There's been a lot of evolution of the Fish and Wildlife Service even in the time I
worked and that's mostly due to legislation like when I started you had a office of
river base and surveys but you didn't have too much authority but you did good
work, now that's evolved into environmental statements and, and commenting on
59
those and, and any Corp or Engineer project has to take Fish and Wildlife, there
are just lots of involvement, different involvement, on different kinds of
environmental matters. The endangered species for instance none of which was
there when I first started working.
Q Let's go back to endangered species and the changes you saw in that
and, and how the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has been changed in
certain aspects because of (inaudible).
So, so the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has spread out so much
since, since the early days because of new add ons and so on that has created I
think, a certain problem because the, the refuge division for instance is probably
always been under funded as compared to the Park Service it, it's played second
fiddle, we have more land, we do more with it then the Park Service does, you
can hunt and fish on our land or I can't help but saying our when I mean Fish and
Wildlife, our, I'll always work for Fish and Wildlife Service I guess but at any rate,
refuges have been under funded and been a problem, that's been a problem but
we've got refuges in every state now and, and so there's some resentment in the
refuge division against that lack of funding and feeling the Fish and Wildlife
Service the whole is draining funds from the refuges. I really don't accept that
thing, I think on early days at least it was partly the Systems fault and it's going to
take time to change but 20 years ago or 30 years ago refuge managers really
wanted a refuge to sort of lock it up and throw away the key and not let anybody
on them and it's only in the last couple of decades that they've realized that
visitor centers and public education and involvement of the public is important
and, and so that we're getting more and more public support but, but it'll take
time and I, I, it will probably never approach the monetary status of the parks so
we can't do as much and I think that's probably not all bad. I don't think we
should have as much money as the Parks Service have because that would
mean we were getting too many visitors.
60
Q Did you have, was that a conflict, how was all that resolved between
traditional native uses and, and the Migratory Bird Act and those things?
Legally the natives have never been able to take waterfowl, they did, so basically
if an, a native shot a duck in spring, he was violating the law and when, when
you've lived off dry fish all winter and, and haven't had much else a goose in
spring tastes pretty good so there was pretty good justification for, for amending
the Migratory Bird Treaty to permit hunting in spring but the, it came out you
know you can't let a particular ethnic group hunt so it's done more on the basis of
the size of your community for and so on, and, and I think it's going to, could
create problems down the line but where do you, where do you saw it off and
how, how firm a regulation you can have. If they regulate the take in spring very
carefully it's fine but as a population in some of the remote areas increases it
could cause a problem so I'd like to, to, to see regulations pretty well enforced for
my own point of view. On the other hand this is a, a problem for the Fish and
Wildlife Service because when you've got very, very powerful Senators such as
Senator Stevens you don't want, and he's completely in support of the native
positions, that's where a lot of votes come from and it is for other Senators and
Representatives too, you're not going to do too much to bucky them and so there
probably hasn't been as much enforcement of laws against natives as might be
other wise possible. Looking back clear at the history of that--
Q When you were a refuge manager would you look the other way or were
you looking for violations or was your territory--
Basically, I, I told the natives I wasn't going to go out enforcing laws or try to find
them but if they shot a duck in front of me they better watch out and I never paid,
and basically they didn't, they, they they knew I sympathized with them to a very
large extent but when I was out there, their equipment was much inferior to now.
Now, they've got a fast boat with a 65 or 115 horsepower motor and they, they
can hunt three watersheds over from where they were and even when I was
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there you could see the rivers they lived in and the next river there would be any
geese on the river any more and then the further you got from a village there're
more geese and, and so that clearly subsistence hunting in spring had an impact
on waterfowl and then I think the Fish and Wildlife Service missed a bet, they
didn't recognize the amount of waterfowl that the natives were taking and so
seasons in California were set sort ignoring the native take and that, and then we
had some years of severe predation on the Delta, nesting predation and a
combination of those various things sent the goose population on the Yukon
Delta into a tailspin and the populations ended up less then a fourth of what they
were. I think Capplers we were concerned that it might have to be put on the
endangered list though, it fell short of that but,--
Q List some of your career, what your sense of feeling and accomplishment,
what are the highlights?
It was all sort of a highlight from my point of view. It was just, every job I had I
enjoyed. I think probably the least fun but the most important in that, that sense
of highlight was the National Interest Lands Act, the work I did for that but both
for, for just pure enjoyment and, and also accomplishing something the waterfowl
studies on Rampart and, and the initial studies on the Yukon Delta, the large
number of students that were able to pursue their careers when I was out there
were, were very good and then starting the marine bird program and, and a really
good program. All of those things are, I, I sort of walked from one highlight to
another. So, I had a much better career I think then most people ever get an
opportunity to have.
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Hank Hansen
Well, my real name is Henry Hansen but I don’t answer to that I answer only to
Hank and I have for many years.
Q What was your education?
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and I left right after I graduated from high school I
went to college in Nebraska, a little college in York, Nebraska that went to
defunct at the beginning or shortly after the beginning of World War II, just
weren’t enough students to keep the thing operating I guess. I got my Bachelor’s
Degree there and immediately went into the Service in fact, I was inducted before
I graduated and they, they deferred me until I got my degree because I was pre-med
and in those early days just before the war pre-meds and engineering
majors were all, they were—they, they let us, they let us finish our degree before,
but we understood that as soon as we got our degree no matter what we were
majoring in we were going to be inducted which I was. As a matter of fact, I take
some measure of pride in you may or may not remember, how that first, that first
induction was made. Franklin Roosevelt was President and his Chief Of the
Military, whatever it was called then, General Hershey and the first draftees,
General Hershey reached into a big fish bowl and brought out a handful of slips
of paper with names on, my name was in the first, the first handful of –
(airplane noise)
Well, he reached into that fishbowl and pulled out a handful of names and mine
was in that first handful. I was among the very first inductees but I was, as I say,
they let me alone until I graduated but as soon as I graduated I, I went in and I
was inducted into, into the ground troops into the field artillery and I could, I
couldn’t see my life flashing before my eyes out there pounding the turf so I
63
enlisted in the Air Corp in the Army Air Corp and was accepted and that’s where
I, well I still had to go through basic training in the ground troops but after 14
weeks of that they released me and I went into the Air Corp before Pearl Harbor,
that was, this was early, early on and I went through flight school in Arkansas
and then I knocked around in many, many training units in the state side before I
eventually ended up in a fighter reconnaissance outfit in Europe and did all of my
oversees time flying P51’s in England and France and Germany and when I
came home I still had, I still had my intent to go back to med school, I had a
scholarship to the University of Nebraska, school of medicine and but I found out
in the meanwhile that there’d been a new science developed and it was called
wildlife management and that’s what I really wanted. The only, the only real
reason I found out that I wanted to go to med school was to make enough money
that I could hunt and fish all I wanted and when I found out here was a science
that had been developed that I could get into and it revolved around fish and
wildlife, game of all kind I immediately transferred to one of the very first wildlife
schools and that was Iowa State University and I got my Master’s Degree at Iowa
State and came out to Washington State at Pullman to get my PHD and then
took a job with the Washington State Game Department and I worked for them
seven, eight years before I had an opportunity to go to Alaska 19, well, I had a
chance to go to Alaska early but I had accepted a, a teaching job with
Washington State and Clarence Road came through and was taking an airplane
up to, to Alaska and he contacted me or vise versa and he wanted me to go up to
Alaska, he offered me a job and that was in 1947 and he offered me a job on the
spot to fly up with him. Well, I had just accepted a one semester teaching job at
Washington State and I didn't feel it was right to accept the job and then
immediately walk away and leave them with nobody to teach their wildlife
courses. So, I, I regretfully turned Clarence down at that time and then I went to
work for the state of Alaska, Department of Game--
Q State of Washington.
64
Or state of Washington, Department of Game and I worked for them until, until
the spring of 1947, early '47 and a job became available in Alaska, a flying job,
flyway biologist job and it was the first one up there and I decided I just couldn't
pass it up again so, I left, I left the state of Washington and I went, I went to
Alaska and started flying that spring.
Q How was it in Alaska and the knowledge of waterfowl and management
and had there been any work done before or what was the science at that point?
Well, there had been a few cursory waterfowl surveys. Dave Spenser had done
a little surveying out on the Yukon Delta and Bob Scott had flown a survey for a
spring or two but they were, they were not very coherent, they were just kind of
exploratory and they and there was no attempt to really put things together and
make a, a program and, and determine what was up there, where it was, how to
go about making a good coherent survey comparable of what they were all ready
doing in the Canadian prairies and that was, that was my first shore was to locate
the waterfowl habitat, map the waterfowl habitat, determine how to go about
setting up the surveys so that I could do, I could replicate them year after year
and make sense out of what was there and we found out from the outset that
there was not way that we could compare the Alaska habitat and waterfowl with
what they were doing down in the Canadian prairies. It was, it was not adding
apples and oranges, it was even more diverse then that. So, I went ahead and
set up some surveys that were unique to Alaska, completely differen

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1
Transcripts of
(Unedited nor corrected)
Alaska Pioneers
1. Jim King 1
2. Cal Lensink 42
3. Hank Hansen 62
4. Jerry Lawhorn 86
5. Tom Wardleigh 93
6. Brina Kessel 99
2
Jim King
I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska for 33 years, starting out
as a game management agent in territorial days when the Fish and Wildlife
Service operated as a Game Department in Alaska and we did all the wildlife
work that was done in Alaska then. So, it was a job that included things like duck
banding and game surveys and then a big part of it was law enforcement and --
Well, there was some early game laws that applied to Alaska and some that were
designed for Alaska, but they were kind of political and local oriented and it
wasn't until 1925 that a real game law was passed and there was a set up
designed for monitoring what was going on with the Game Commission, the
Alaska Game Commission, it was called.
They hired local guys and even when I was hired I didn't go through the normal
government process of being on a register or what not. I just filled out some
employment papers and you know, never did take a civil service test, I guess.
So, it was a system that worked pretty good but what had been going on was that
you had all this hoard of people that showed up with the gold rush and no rules
so, they were doing what ever was handy with wildlife.
Judge Wickersham, an honorable and well respected important person in Alaska,
he described going up the Cantishna River. He was going to climb Mount
McKinley and he had a big group of people and they shot a moose every two
days because they couldn't keep the meat and they'd have fresh meat for a
couple of days and they'd have to get another one. He did comment on that, that
it was a shame they were wasting all this meat.
Well, that sort of thing was going on, foxes were worth a lot of money and some
trappers would go out and shoot a moose or a caribou and fill it, you know scatter
3
strychnine, strychnine all around and foxes would come. And they'd, they'd pick
up the foxes but also an array of birds and ravens and raptors of one sort or
another and bears and wolverines and those things would become a really
unattractive mess for if somebody had been using strychnine. So, those early
game laws ended the use of poisons for one thing and, and there was a lot of
support for that.
Yes, that's right. The, let's see there was a, Alfred Brooks, who the Brooks
Range is named after, wrote a book about Alaska resources. He was one of the
first people to talk about the oil seeps on the north slope, which the natives of
course, knew about. That they could burn this stuff that came squirting out here
and there or bubbling out.
But, he had said in this book, that he wrote somewhere in the early part of the
20th century, that it was too bad that the beaver and the martin and the sea otter
were on the road to extinction and would soon be gone and, but that was the
price of progress. And so then in 1925 for the first time there was real interest in,
in curbing that form of progress to a certain degree and so, they did a good job.
They stopped the, those early guys, they stopped the use of poisons, market
hunting and this business of wasting meat, because you couldn't keep it. And all
the really wasteful practices and the people that lived in the bush by in large
supported that. And the game wardens were kind of part of the country and were
not considered oh, invaders or government bureaucracy that was being abusive
of the people. They could see immediately that this was helping.
Well, there was a guy named Sam White that lived in Fairbanks in the late 20's.
And when they were just starting to develop airplanes and he had a big dog team
and he described as a group of or a pack of free thinking dogs that he would tie
up to his sled and go off looking for violators with the dogs hooping and howling.
4
and spend all his time tending his dogs. And he was the one that recognized the
possibility of airplanes.
And I think it was 1929 that he learned to fly and bought a little airplane and flew
out and caught somebody doing something wrong, shooting cow moose or
something. And he proceeded to use this airplane some and he got a lot of
criticism from it. And there were memos in the files when I went to work in
Fairbanks scolding Sam White for being out in his airplane on working time.
He went and did a moose count with his airplane and there was a memo telling
him to take annual leave for the time he was in his airplane and get out with his
dog team and do a proper moose count.
So, there was a lot of that and, it got rough and he quit over that but by the time
he quit he had pretty well set the pattern of using airplanes. As far as I know he
may have been the first person in the world that tried to use airplanes for any
kind of conservation work.
And I think the thing that really got it going was he and Clarence Rhode made a
joint patrol along the border with the Canadian Mounties. And there was a lot of
illegal traffic and fur back and forth across the border and they were able to
gather up a number of these people that were doing that.
One of the things was that Alaska had a bounty on wolves so every Canadian
was trying to send his wolves to Alaska to get the fifty-dollar bounty and things
like that were going on.
Well, the biological survey went back, what to the late 1800's but in 1940 I think it
was that the Biological Survey and the Bureau of commercial fish or the Bureau
of Fisheries or something were combined into the Fish and Wildlife Service so
that was, that was eleven or twelve years before my time started.
5
Well, this border patrol with the Canadians well, that kind of caught the public
fancy. And there was stories in the newspapers about it and got the attention I
guess, of people higher up in the Fish and Wildlife Service or Biological Survey
then. And they begin to recognize the potential and then World War II came
along and of course, everybody got drafted or into you know.
World War II hit Alaska pretty hard and Alaska was invaded and that had a
dramatic effect on everybody that was there. So, the Fish and Wildlife Service
kind of almost vanished during that period and there was a big influx of military.
And perhaps another abusive period on the wildlife. There was a lot of
controversy over that and books have been written about conflicts with the
military. and but, After the war then this rebuilding process went into effect.
Clarence Road had, had been on this border patrol and he became first in, he
learned to fly as a result of that and then spent some time setting up an aircraft
division in Anchorage. And as a result of, of that work, he kind of caught the
attention as a good manager and organizer. And he went on to be the regional
director of the Alaska region. And he wanted everybody in the organization that
wanted to fly, and he encouraged young people, like me to get a license. And,
and you know it was easier to learn to fly then to, to not in a way.
I was stationed in Fairbanks and we had three airplanes there then and I think
there was only four agents.
Starting, I went to work in 1951, in Fairbanks, so.
I went through the normal you know, flight school kind of thing in Fairbanks.And
then they had a rule then that you had to have a license and a hundred hours of
experience before you could then go through a check ride with the aircraft
6
division people. And then initially you would be authorized to fly under
somebody's direction. And there was a very experienced pilot in Fairbanks and
in charge of the station. And I flew with him a lot and, and you know for the next
two or three years, after I got authorized to fly, I was supposed to not make any
trips that I didn't check out with him and --
Well, I was, the beginning of waterfowl surveys was occurring then. You know
this was the same period that they were developing in the prairies. And we were
a little behind so initially in the early 50's some of the game management agents
were doing waterfowl surveys in their own districts. And it produced a product
that was hard to deal with.
There were some biologists then who in Juneau and other places that were trying
to put a forecast to the fall flight. And as soon as he could manage it Roads
wanted to get a full time waterfowl biologist assigned to this.
And so about 1956 he brought on Hank Hanson who had been a World War II
fighter pilot and an instructor in waterfowl at Washington State. And had worked
for Washington State Wildlife Department doing waterfowl, duck work.
And so, Hank kind of reorganized these, initial efforts that the game agents had
been working on. And the other key figure was Dave Spencer, who had been
involved with starting transect surveys in the prairies, and he did the first
waterfowl surveys on the Yukon delta in 1949.
And well that was when descriptions of the waterfowl, before that people just
talked about clouds of waterfowl, or that kind of thing but no numbers. And
Spencer identified the big goose nesting areas on the Yukon delta for brant and
emperor geese. And he wrote a paper called Alaska's or American's greatest
goose brant nesting area. And it was the first real description of that except oh,
there'd been people on the ground before that had come before like E.W. Nelson
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who toured with a dog team on the Yukon delta and Olaus Maurie and some
other people had come by dog team to Hooper bay on the Yukon delta and then
stayed till mid summer and they described the birds there in some detail.
And there was two or three books written about that but it wasn't till these
airplane surveys that you could really describe what was going on, on the Yukon
delta and that was sort of true of all the big valleys in Alaska and the big coastal
plains.
Well, that started in '49 with Spencer extending the systems that he'd helped
develop on the, on the prairies.
Well, they set up a 16 mile strip usually marked with a pencil on a map and then
the pilot and a person on the right would fly along this strip at about a hundred
feet and counted all the birds within an eighth of mile. And there were various
ways to learn how to judge the eighth of a mile strip. And so, if you flew a 16 mile
transact and counted all the birds for an eighth of a mile on each side, you had a
four mile square sample, that would be a quarter of a 16 miles.
And so then you could take the data from that and apply random sampling
statistics to, if you did enough of these things to determine you know, some
sampling error and come up with a pretty good figure. You learn pretty quick
whether you need to do more or you'd done enough and that sort of thing.
Well, then after Spencer started do that on the Yukon delta, it wasn’t known how
to set these things and that '49 survey he, he did a variety of patterns with these
things and then other people set them up in the other valleys. It became evident
that the really thickest, densest duck populations weren't on the Yukon delta they
were on the Yukon flats. Right in the northern part of the Yukon river valley which
just touches the Arctic circle.
8
And people hadn't paid much attention to that area before the airplane because
in the summer time it was just a big boggy place. It was hard to get around. The
natives there moved to the river in the summer and then the country was pretty
empty.
In the wintertime, people were running around with dog teams and hunting
moose and trapping but in the summer it was just, people weren't out there until
airplanes came along. Well, there was a little bit of people out first thing in the
spring shooting muskrats but after the muskrats were gone, all the nesting
season, the area just wasn't, wasn't useful.
Well, it came here to Patuxent and was used in, in the forecasts and the
regulation setting process and, you know, it evolved over time. One of the things
that of course was immediately obvious was that you didn't see everything when
you were flying a, you know going at 90 miles an hour across the tundra and
things are going by pretty fast.
And so they started working on a correction factor for the things you didn't see
and there was a lot of work on that done in the prairies where they could send a,
a ground crew along a road at the same time they were sending an airplane
overhead. And you know, they actually could do it simultaneously and the guys
on the ground would come up with a figure for what was on the lake and then
compare with, with what the pilots saw, lake by lake actually.
And that continues and they do change the correction factor every year in the
prairies but that doesn't work in Alaska cause there wasn't any roads to, to run
down. So, they had some sort of standard correction factor for a number of
years. I don't know how they came out with it but, it was very, way below so for a
number of years it showed Alaska didn't produce very many birds because we
didn't have a proper correction factor. And actually Bruce got into that with a
helicopter a few years ago and, and now there are pretty good correction factors
9
for Alaska that show that Alaska actually produces a lot more birds then were
originally thought. This is always kind of a discovery process.
Well, yeah, it started with the district agents you know, and then statehood came
along and, and law enforcement authority went to the state for wildlife. And so
the game management agents, such as myself, were either transferred outside
or, or went into another job. And I became a refuge manager then and then I was
the refuge manager on the Yukon delta for a few years and then switched. to
Hank Hanson transferred to, actually to, to this area, to Washington and so I
then had the survey job which I did for 20 years. But it was kind of a, initially it
was a discovery process.
There were more oh, little river deltas that we looked at and we looked at
distribution of swans and separated the trumpeter swan from the, the tundra
swan nesting areas. We got more into banding birds and determined where the,
see a lot of the white fronted geese from Alaska. They're all over Alaska, half of
them go down the Pacific flyway to California and the other half go east of the
mountains to Texas.
And you know, these were kind of exciting things to learn. And then in this period
the new states first senator, one of the first senators, Ernest Greening decided he
needed to bring home a big chunk of money to improve the economy in Alaska.
And the, the way he was going to do it was to dam up the Yukon and create the,
the Lake Erie size impoundment and the biggest hydro project in the United
States, bigger then any other hydra project in Russia. This sort of flooded the
entire Yukon flats. And it, the dam was to be at a little village called Rampart so
the project became the Rampart Dam Project.
And there was enough concern at that time there was oh, legislation requiring
wildlife studies for hydra projects before they were, were done. And so there was
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so many to, to study the fish in the Yukon, which were important. King salmon
and dog salmon both came that far up in big numbers and native populations
were dependent on these fish.
And then these early transact counts had shown large numbers of ducks on the
Yukon Flats so we had two years to do a duck study there. Cal Lensing set up
plots and did production studies and I spent two summers there banding ducks.
And we banded about , I think 18,000 ducks that were a variety of species. That
video you had, showed people at Canvasback Lake. We named that, We caught
some Canvasbacks there.
But the interesting thing about these ducks that we banded, there was they
distributed. I don't know, to 40 other states and all the provinces to Ontario. And
the canvas backs that we caught there, lots of them wound up in Chesapeake
Bay and they were hunted in places like Fingerlakes in New York. We got a lot
of our bands and the, oh, the lesser scaup were hunted heavily in, in Minnesota
and all the way down the Mississippi flyway to Louisiana in, in big numbers. And
that's a, you know, our survey showed that scaup were a big producer on the
flats, so this was kind of exciting and suddenly wildlife people began to think
more about hey, this place is producing something for us. and the International
Association of Fish and Wildlife Commissioners, that's an organization that
changes it's name every few years so I probably haven't got it right.
(Tape change)
Well, Clarence Road who was the regional director in the 50's was a pilot and --
Well, there were extensive ground studies which is necessary to you know, count
ducklings and that sort of thing and Cal Lensing did these plot counts to get a
feel for the productivity of the area and then I did this banding and these birds
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just went swish all over the country and some of them got as far as the
Caribbean and some of them got as far as Panama.
And it showed that here this valley in Alaska was producing something for people
all over North America and Central America and it is a unique place. I don't see
people talking about what a unique thing this Yukon Flats is but it’s, we used to
talk about it as a sun bowl because it's on the arctic circle and it's protected from
the coast by mountains in all directions and so protected from storms.
And the arctic sun just goes round and round in the spring you get a type of
heating that's not normal in the arctic because of the protection the hills give it.
And these lakes we were banding ducks on, we actually measured 70 degree
water temperatures, which I don't know if there's anyplace in Canada you can
find that on the arctic circle. And, and we used to laugh about these, they had a
program about Hawaii calling and they'd give the water temperature and the air
temperature and they'd both be close to 70 and we would get that on the Yukon
flats in the summer.
So, what you have is a, is a type of productivity that is similar to the best water
productivity of the Canadian prairies and Minnesota and the Dakotas. And the,
the duck fauna and densities are equal to the best anywhere in the country. So
there's about 20,000 square miles, something like that on the Yukon flats that
would have been flooded and this is this 70 degree.
I think your, your other video said something like 30,000 lakes or something like
that, but there's ducks everywhere and other birds too. It’s the highest density of
ducks in Alaska. The warmest summer temperatures and the greatest variety of
ducks and other birds. And of course at that time passerines didn't have a high
visibility in service activities and we didn't even look at all the passerines which
they are looking at now.
12
But you know, some of us were kind of bird watchers and we did note the
different varieties there that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Alaska. So,
anyway I had an interesting personal aspect to that.
I got married the spring before we got into this banding, so I rented a cabin in
Fort Yukon and that was sort of, we laugh about it now, that was our honeymoon
home, Fort Yukon. But anyway, these ducks went so far and wide that it caught
the attention of, particularly the International Association of Fish and Wildlife
Agencies and they talked to the big conservation organizations and a lot of the
state game department directors, all registered strong objection to Rampart dam.
And Ernest Greening, who is a really eloquent speaker, I think he was one of the
great speakers in the Congress at that time, was preaching, ‘we've got to have
this electricity. And it got to be quite a, you know there was a lot stuff in the
newspapers and the reports and booklets came out. And people all over the
country were aware of that and this was the first, I guess ,I wouldn't say that but it
was one of the wildlife issues that caught the fancy of, of the country.
So then it was, about a few years late, when the statehood act had granted a
million some acres to the state of Federal land and it took a long time to, to sort
that out and decide which million acres they were going to get.
And then the native people came in and said well, this is our land and they filed
claims and Congress was working on that. And then it was Morris Udall and
Congressman Sailor, I think a few others in Congress decided well, if, if we're
going to decide what the state gets and what the natives get we ought to decide
what we want for parks and refuges. And let's see, I think it was Stuart Udall
that, that put a hold on what they called a land freeze, which was holding up
things like oil development or, exploration, Then he just established this freeze
until all of this land stuff was settled and I don't know, what did we get, 50 million
acres of waterfowl refuges?
13
Well, I was doing these waterfowl surveys then in all the valleys and I actually
came back here and Cal Lensing (inaudible) and worked on the, we worked on
the Yukon flats together. We came back here and analyzed all that banding. Cal
did that and then I re-evaluated all the, the survey data and we drew boundaries
and then they were submitted as proposals for refuges and that was the, what
became the Tetlan refuge, the Yukon Flats, the Kuyukuk refuge, the Kanuit,
Novitana, Selewick and Inonoko and Yukon Delta. And those were the ones I
was involved in and the boundaries of those were, were really set on the survey
boundaries that we had been using for waterfowl.
Well, if you look at a relief map of Alaska, it's quickly apparent that the biggest
mountains in North America are sort of sprinkled across Alaska and in between
these big mountains are extremely low valleys. And like Fairbanks which looks
like it's in the middle of Alaska and in view of Mount McKinley is only 450 feet
above sea level I think and so you have this combination of very high terrain and,
and very low terrain--
Well, you have the highest mountains of North America scattered around in
Alaska with these really low elevation valleys in the interior there and they're
broad flood plains of big rivers. And in the interior, they're under laid by
permafrost even though the summer temperatures are similar to say Minnesota.
The annual temperature is way lower and you have this frozen substrate, which
prevents percolation of water.
So, you have all of this surface water that, and then another nice climatic
characteristic that makes Alaska important in this regard is that most of the
rainfall in the interior occurs in August and September.
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So you have a nice dry period in the spring for the baby ducklings to get their
start then before freeze up. It starts to rain and saturates the soil and then it
freezes in a saturated condition and the following spring it doesn't rain. But you
have the frost going down and water coming up in the, in the capillaries so you
have a nice rich vegetation even without any rainfall.
And kind of, well one of these neat systems that's developed there and so areas
like the Yukon flats are just covered with these really rich shallow lakes. And
because the water isn't percolating out and these were the areas that we were
looking at for initially assessing the waterfowl that were going to be hunted in
California primarily. But also in all of these other states down the Mississippi
flyway and, and to a certain extent further east, Chesapeake Bay.
So, Patuxent was developing this system of evaluating annual waterfowl
numbers. The spring surveys tell you, tell them what has survived the winter and
made it, made a successful spring migration. And then some ground studies
show how they, what kind of production they've had and this results in a forecast
of how many ducks are going to be available to, to hunt.
And if the numbers have gone down seasons can be shortened and bag limits
can be restricted or numbers are booming then regulations can be liberalized and
so that was the purpose of all these aerial surveys. But then when the Congress
decided they wanted to set up some refuges in Alaska, this fit right it.
We had the, we had the figures to, to sell these areas as valuable for refuges to
the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. When Cal Lensing and I came back
here was Spencer Smith and I remember when we first talked with him he said,
you know this was in the time that they were trying to oh, buy some refuge land
in the Dakotas with duck stamp money and spending a lot of money to get a little
production areas and he told us we want every acre of productive waterfowl
habitat in Alaska that we can get and our instructions were to draw the
15
boundaries of these areas as big as we could justify and we did and we had fun
doing it. That was a nice invitation really.
Well, there's no roads and there are trails all over the Yukon Flats and some of
these other areas. But for getting out to the lakes where we were banding ducks
and for doing the production surveys which were based on plots, the only
practical way was to go by airplane. And so we had planes there at Fort Yukon
for that and the same is true of the Yukon Delta.
The Yukon delta is more of an Arctic climate even though it's south of the Yukon
flats, it's treeless tundra and but there's no roads and the only way to, there are
rivers and sloughes that you can get around in a boat. But really, if you're going
to go where the action is for the birds, you got to go the way they go and fly
there.
Well, one of the things we worked on then was developing boats we could carry
in the airplanes. And there was a guy in Juneau that worked with a manufacturer
-and this was prior to good quality inflatable boats - those things didn't exist
when we were doing these studies in the 60's. And he took a 16 foot fiberglass
boat and cut it in five pieces and put bulkheads in the thing and came up with a
deal you could stack up like a set of camp dishes. And then they had a pretty
good little boat we could put a motor on. We, for a while we were carrying
canoes on the airplanes outside, and even though we never had an accident with
the carry boats outside it was illegal for non-government people to do that. And it
wasn't a comfortable thing to be carrying a big bulky think outside of your
airplane. Airplanes aren't designed for that except for the beaver and so getting
the boats inside was, everybody was interested in that. Now, they have really
good inflatable boats so, that's the way to go but, this camp dish arrangement
was kind of fun for a while.
16
Yeah, well it was a dream of Clarence Road that he would have all of his people
or as many as possible flying. And he used to say that the light airplane to his
people is as the pickup is to wildlife people in other places. He encouraged
everybody that wanted to, to fly. You know, some people don't want to fly and
they weren't stigmatized for that. But it became a pretty routine thing and
actually worked really well. The biologist--
Well, they started off getting some surplus military planes after World War II and
they weren't entirely satisfactory. And then oh, about 19, late 50's they started
getting Piper Pacers and Piper Pacer was a post war airplane, extremely well
built. ut it, there again speed was something that would appeal to people so it
was designed to, they shortened the wings I guess to make it fly faster so it's
performance on skies and floats was, was not all that great.
But we used Pacers for a number of years and they were really good airplanes. I
don't know, there must have been 10 or 15 of those purchased and then, what in
the beginning around 1960, the Cessna 180 showed up and that was better yet
although it wasn't, the 180, the Cessna's are not as good a cold weather
airplane.
The Pacer was neat, we used to heat those with a plumbers fire pot. I don't think
anybody nowadays knows what a plumber's fire pot is. There was a, you know,
back then plumbing sewer pipe was joined with a lead seal and plumbers had
this little stove that they'd melt lead on for sealing up these pipe joints. And going
back to the thirties the pilots in Fairbanks had determined that you could put a
little engine cover, a tent arrangement over your engine and put a fire pot under
it.
If you didn't burn the plane up in due course it would get warm and you could
start the engine. And then there was some tricks developed to prevent the thing
from burning up. We would at night instead of just switching off the engine you
17
would switch off the fuel switch and then run the engine until it cleared the
gasoline pretty much out of the carburetor. And the, you know the parts and the
engine and then we'd always drain the oil out of it. And they designed quick
drains so that you could put an oil can under there and get the warm oil out and
then we'd take that to bed with you, take it in the house or where ever you were --
Well, actually the arctic wildlife range is not big waterfowl habitat so we never
had any survey areas there. And there are waterfowl along the coast there but as
a, it's not a waterfowl area so I never did do much work there. But going back to
when I was a game agent we did go up there and look for caribou and things but
in recent years the waterfowl people have been much more interested in the
national petroleum reserve further west which is just now beginning to be
developed for oil. So, I can't say a whole lot about the arctic wildlife refuge; it's a
splendid area.
Well, of course there's sort of a, a lot of macho folk tales that seem to emerge
from Alaska. And you hear people interviewing pilots and the first thing they want
to know about is the accidents and maybe want to know if there were any babies
born in your airplane. Things like that entered the image of Alaska pilots but as
far as we were concerned that wasn't the part of it, the.
We had good airplanes and this aircraft division that they set up in Anchorage,
Roads, it was Road's dream, but it was a guy named Theron Smith’s ability that
put together an operation that the airplanes were in really good shape. We had
some mechanical problems but we didn't have the sort of things that come from
careless maintenance like instantaneous engine failures and that sort of thing,
engines flying apart. We'd have engines that would have troubles but usually
they would start running rough and you'd get somewhere where you'd could get
something done about it and so we really quite worrying about engine failures in
that sense and--
18
Yeah, by the time I came along there were what were called world aeronautical
charts, wac charts. And they're 16 miles to the inch and they got pretty good
contours. And you know, because of the way Alaska's laid out, you've got all
these big mountain areas and then river valleys between and even going back to
the 30's, when the pilots were learning to fly around without any maps, there is
kind of a pattern to the country that you could follow and get around.
And then there are passes in the, in the big mountains that are rivers. We spent
a lot of time following rivers if the weather would be bad you know, if you could
get on the Yukon or the Tannana or the Cyacook you can follow the river and it
was, it was you know sort of a, I don't know, it was a little bit of a sort of, I used to
say I fly like a lark in the woods. You learn a little bit about the country and the
weather and you use those to your advantage. Now, everything is instrumental
and you don't need to learn the country as long as all of your instruments are
working.
Well, you know in the wintertime we always carried equipment to warm the
airplane up but also tents and sleeping bags so that we could, and food, so that
we could stop if we got in bad weather. And after the, after I got into the full time
waterfowl work, I wasn't flying in the winter much anymore. But these amphib
float planes that we wound up using for waterfowl work, we'd always carry, and
Bruce does today, tents and sleeping bags and a box of food as well as oh, some
emergency rations if you smash the airplane all up.
But nobody ever has smashed an airplane all up and that's one of the intriguing
things that's never really been analyzed, but for some reason now and in over 50
years, of this low level transect flying for ducks, there's never been a fatality
connected with that.
And you know, you're breaking some of the conventional theories about flying
where speed and altitude are supposed to provide safety and here the waterfowl
19
biologists cruising around low and slow and that's not supposed to be right but
the safety record for the both here but in Canada and in the prairie states where
they run these things. There's been a few oh, wheels up landings and minor
fender bender type accidents, but I don't know of anybody that has ever been
hurt of that group of pilot biologists and that applied to oh, the refuge people in
Alaska as well.
Well, we've talked about it some you know, the Fish and Wildlife pilots talk about
it some--
The safety record is good but it doesn't apply clear across the board in the Fish
and Wildlife Service because there are some professional pilots and Clarence
Road was one who have had fatal accidents in larger airplanes. Roads flew for
airlines during World War II and well he was top of the line for professional pilots
at that time. And there was another Grumman goose lost in Southeast with a
bunch of fishery biologists, cracked up in the woods. And then after OAS came
along there were some serious accidents with OAS pilots.
And then there was one refuge fatality with a guy that had, he was a military pilot,
ex-military pilot that had been working for just a month or so and he cracked up
in the Brooks terrain and killed himself and a state biologist. So and
When OAS came along, this was, you know the Fish and Wildlife, has it's own
aircraft division and then it was transferred to this interior department thing and
they worked out a, you know their own bookkeeping. And OAS doesn't have any
accidents. If there's an accident then it's attributed to the agency that was paying
for the trip so some of their pilots have banged up planes and killed Fish and
Wildlife people. And it's a Fish and Wildlife accident you know, that's the way the
record is. And so this business of the pilot biologist not killing themselves or their
passengers is sort of buried in the record book but it's a true thing and I think
maybe actually flying around low the way we do, you learn to get a feel of the
20
country better and you're watching the weather in a different way then people
flying higher. One of the things that happens to the ones that stay way up in the
air is suddenly they get a low ceiling and have to come down lower and every
thing looks different and we're always low so if we get a low ceiling we don't even
notice.
Well, I started initially flying in a Pacer, Piper Pacer which is a four place engine.
And I think it was hoped that it would be a business airplane because they
shortened the wings and made it go a little faster. The Service was the refuge
people, particularly were using Super Cubs as well and the predator control
people but we were using the Pacer and it had a range of four hours and forty
minutes.
And we flew those all over but on floats for things like long trips. Course you had
to land in the water where ever it was and at that time in all the villages in Alaska
you could buy gasoline in ten gallon, five gallon cans. Two five gallon cans came
in a wooden box and so, and those boxes and the cans where valuable material
but we spent an awful lot of time carrying boxes and cans down to river banks.
And a lot of time in the evening looking for places to tie the plane to in case the
wind came up. And that was a big aspect of operating on floats, in some places
they had barreled gas and we'd roll these barrels for half a mile to get them down
the river bank and that was a good part of your day when I first started doing
surveys
And actually another problem with the floats was the duck surveys come
immediately after breakup in the spring, so not all the ice is gone and places are
short of gas. They haven't had their first supply boat of the spring yet. So, we
had to contend with all of that.
You know, Hank Hanson and I landed at Anvick one time with about a half hours
gas in the tank. We thought we were nearly out and the guy at the store said
21
well, it would be about 10 days before we could fill up. This when he was
expecting his first supply. And we were standing around in the store debating
this deal and what to do and couldn't think we had enough gas to get anywhere.
And people came in, Anvick's not a very big community, and here were a couple
of strangers in town so everybody had to come look and finally some old guy said
well, he had found this barrel of gas floating down the river and he didn't know
whether he ought to put it in his boat because it was, said aviation on it.
And so Hank assured him that it would be terrible for his boat but, that he could
help him out and give him enough money for his barrel to, to replace the, so he
bought that for a good deal more then the replacement cost but things like that
would happen.
Then, we used to go into the inlet cleat and they'd always be out of gas so Hank
set up the deal when he'd come in in the spring he's buy enough gas and pay for
it for the next spring and they'd keep his gas there all for him and the whole
town'd be out and that worked. It was interesting that they never let him down on
that.
I described how operating on straight floats was awkward and then this was
another one of the Dave Spencer innovations. The Eddo float company came
out with the first set of amphibious floats with retractable wheels. And the floats
and he ordered one of those for the refuge, the Kenai refuge and nobody liked to
fly it. It took a long run to get it in the air and it, it wouldn't climb and I learned
much later that this was a function of the center of gravity being too low. You
know, pilots worry about fore and aft center of gravity but engineers know about
vertical center of gravity and if it's too low you can't pull the nose up and climb,
you just pull the nose up and it mushes.
So, that was what this plane did but it, as long as it was in level flight it was fine
and I tried that out and I was making all these stops for my survey route and hey,
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that was just the deal, no more looking for tie downs on the river bank or packing
boxes of gas around. I could pull up to the gas pump and tie up at the, on the
ramp there and it would, it would save one or two hours a day out of a survey
day.
And so it was kind of neat because then suddenly I had exclusive use of one
airplane and I could leave my stuff in it. You know, that aircraft division operated
like a motor pool and the planes people thought were good were in demand and
so you always had to take your stuff out and what not. I can, I could keep this
amphib and it was, oh, there were some other peculiar things with it. The, there
was electrical switches in these floats that didn't always work and sometimes I
couldn't get them down to land on the airport and I'd have to find some water and
go down and shake the switches. And one time I got them, one side up and the
other side down and I finally had to land it that way at the airport at Bethel.
But by in large it was a good airplane for me because I didn't want to climb. I was
staying low and I didn't need to go into short lakes, I could land in rivers and I
used to.
They were using these World War II bombers to carry loads of water out for
forest fires in those days and they'd put too much load in them and they'd take off
there in Fairbanks and be about a hundred feet in the air at the end a three
thousand foot runway and I used to say the only plane that cross the far end of
the runway lower then I do is those Boray bombers called them because I
couldn't get the 180 up with that. so I used that for a while and I liked that
airplane and then they started getting 185's and one 185 was just enough bigger
of an airplane that it could carry these floats better and you had good rate of
climb and a little better speed and good take off performance and I used a 185
for a while. They were kind of the standard and then the Service got Beavers
with amphibious floats. And they're a bigger airplane and a good deal more
rugged so you didn't break little things on them.
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I don't think I ever took a Cessna in for a hundred hour inspection that the door
latches were damaged and little things like that that didn't really effect the
operation of the airplane. But they would, things would happen to those Cessnas
and there were springs on the rudder pedals, I broke one of those springs in
Bethel one year and so I flew it for a week or so and I had to keep about 10
pound pressure on one side of the rudder petals to fly straight but that sort of
thing didn't happen much with the Beavers, they were just, just better built.
They're built in Canada.
So, they were great airplanes and then this Theron Smith who, he spent a lot of
time flying in Grummans. The Grumman goose was a really great airplane that
was designed during or used a lot in World War II by the Navy, twin engine
amphibious airplane. And they used them, the Coast Guard used them for
rescues and, so they were good for sea mammal surveys and fisheries patrols
and that sort of thing but they had some limitations too.
And this Tharen Smith was a bit of a dreamer and he wanted an amphibious
airplane that would fly about 12 hours and carry biologists and in order to
accommodate the biologists, the Grummans were usually a two pilot airplane and
they would fly them on instruments. And so that meant the two front seats were
occupied by the pilots and the biologist that might be paying for the trip had to sit
behind and some of the.
Carl Kennyon used to do sea otter surveys in the Aleutians and he's always be
needling Smith about having to sit in the back and then he used a DC-3 for that
survey so Kennyon would be perched on a bar stool in an isle looking out the
front window. So, there was a lot of good natured banter on that but Smith was
storing this all away and he designed this modified Grumman that he actually
described this to a Senator who he was taking for a ride, a female Senator her,
Congressman she was Interior or Committee Chair Julia Butler Hanson.
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I think her name is still around but Smitty in some way charmed her and she
came up with money enough for him to modify his Grumman. So, he stretched it
out a little and put a couple of seats behind the pilot and co-pilot so he could
have a couple of biologists in there with pilot quality visibility and added another
six or eight hours of fuel capacity. And put these Garrett turbine engines in the
thing and just designed the best airplane for these Aleutian Island sea mammal
surveys and that sort of thing and it was a very successful airplane.
OAS didn't like it because it didn't fit their pattern and they finally sold it but at this
point they were developing the Garrett air research engine and decided to put
one in a beaver. And so they took an Army surplus Beaver and stretched it a little
bit, added tanks. These turbine engines use more fuel per hour then a piston
engine so they made a seven hour airplane out of the turbine engine mounted
Beaver.
And that became, they tried it with some of the other projects but it turned out
that it was more useful for waterfowl work then anything else. And Beavers are
heavy if you're using them, no, if you're not using them for rather heavy work or
long distance stuff they're more airplane then you need.
The Cessnas are better. If you're batting around in small areas where you don't
need a lot range but for these waterfowl surveys the seven hour range was neat.
The ability to, you know you can't really sit in an airplane and count ducks for
seven hours but with the amphibious floats you could stop and we'd always have
a picnic on the tundra somewhere on these long survey days.
And then have a full set of gear so if the weather gets bad you can land and
camp comfortably and we usually had a good time when we'd get stuck some
lake that we hadn't landed on before and camp. And you know, walk around and
learn a little bit about a new area and the same was true for lunch stops. You
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know, you always learn something when you stop at a strange lake that you've
never landed at before. And the birds around and animals around and it was part
of understanding the country I think was, was just. You look at the bottom you
know, sometimes you get stuck on it and you had to turn the airplane around so
you've got to feel for the bank and find a parking place and just having a little
experience in the country that taught you something about it that you wouldn't
have thought of if you were just looking out the window or well.
Then this turbine had another nice characteristics with this regard in that it has a
reversible prop so instead of getting out and fiddling around with your airplane
when you pull up to the bank, you just put it in reverse and back off.. If you
anticipate your landing you can turn around and back in and so you're ready to
go.
So, that was another kind of a break through for waterfowl surveys. It flies a little
faster, a little farther, you get a little more done in a given day with less
expenditure of time and effort. And, and though we couldn't do the kind of
surveys that are being done today with a Pacer on floats to just, you get two or
three times the productivity out of a day that you would with using a little plane
like we started out with.
So, now that, that turbine Beaver that was kind of an experimental thing to start
with has been modified some since and rebuilt and Bruce Connet takes it to
Mexico every winter for winter surveys and then it made something like four trips
to Siberia.
It was the first float plane they'd ever seen in that part of the world because most
float planes burn gasoline and in Russia they use these big turbine helicopters to
get around the country and they burn jet fuel so here was a float plane that burns
jet fuel so it could operate in Siberia where none of the other American float
planes can do that. And so, and now they've got it loaded with modern
26
electronics GPS for navigation and moving map thing that you don't have to carry
a paper chart anymore, you've got a little video screen and you can, the map
keeps moving and little dot, where it shows you where you're at and you don't
have to look out the window anymore.
Well, the turbine Beaver is is really good and it's been extensively modified really
from a standard Beaver. Another aspect of that you know, the turbine Beaver
was that they, they stretched the fuselage and added much better windows. The
turbine engine is smaller then the big radial engine. And instead of building a big
photogenic cowling on the front they put it in a narrow cowling which means that
you can look out and see the toe of the floats ahead.
And and just has way better visibility and one of the things I always did, we were
all the time out, I was doing these surveys we'd use, put our data on a tape
recorder, a voice recorder and I'd bring these things back and transcribe the data
off them. And oh, we'd do that at night and for a number of years I was just a one
man project ,so I'd, I'd have to find somebody to be my observer every year.
And had a long series of different people but I saved all these tapes and then
after Bruce Connet took over the project some years later, he and his assistant
Jack Hodges got some money and they took all these tapes going back to the
50's and had a guy sit down and re-transcribe them and the way we did it in the
past .And the way most of the other survey data is done, both sides record on the
same data sheet and so individual differences are lost.
And what Bruce and Jack Hodges did they re-transcribed all these tapes and
separated them and then did computerized it and did some comparisons
between myself and all the different observers I'd had. And then between the
later crews and what they learned out of all of this was that there hadn't been
much. It didn't seem to hurt to change observers, that there'd be a rough day or
two to start and then after a few days of duck survey both sides would be up to
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speed and that would go on in good shape but the one thing that really did
change was there was a sudden jump in the numbers of ducks in Alaska when
this turbine Beaver with bigger windows came on the job.
Well, the aspect that I mentioned about the improvement in the number of ducks
that a person can record out of an airplane depending on the size of the
windows. So any airplane that was designed for particularly waterfowl where it
should feature big windows on both sides.
You know, we’ve used that turbine Beaver for eagle surveys too, well that’s an
entirely different ball game. We’re, instead of flying straight lines here following
shore lines and the observer on the right is making observations and recording
locations and that puts the pilot on the opposite side from the shoreline he’s
following and in this case you need good visibility from the left seat on the right
side and the turbine beaver is pretty good. Lots of airplanes you can’t really do
that because you can’t, you don’t have the visibility to the right.
So, it might be that the windows could be even improved some if they were
designed you know, starting from scratch to build an airplane to give an even
better visibility and less you know blind spots. Every post and every contour of
the panel are blind spots when you’re looking out. So, developing that kind of
visibility is important to wildlife flying but evidently is not important to most pilots,
all they want to see is sufficient runway to land and enough visibility to see if
there’s other airplanes that are, might be a conflict with.
Well, you know, as I was talking earlier, for the waterfowl surveys you really don’t
need to go into little lakes, if you’re hunting sheep or things like that, going into
high elevation lakes to pack out loads of meat that’s a whole different scheme of
things. But using pretty good sized lakes, when we used those airplanes a lot for
banding ducks as well and hauling banding equipment but there again we’re
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always using lakes with plenty of space. There was no need to go into little
places.
So, that’s not so critical ,if you could, a more efficient engine would be a help so
that you were burning less fuel. And I think that turbine engine that the beaver
has now that’s got more power then you use. The Beaver airframe is restricted
to 121 miles per hour and you know, that engine would probably pull it at 300
miles an hour but you’re not allowed to do that it might, the engine might go off
by itself at such speeds, leave you hanging there. So, a smaller engine using
less fuel.
Using a lot of fuel is, you know it takes time to put it in for one thing and here, up
there on the wing, fiddling around when one of the things. I asked the aircraft
division for one time was some handles up on top of the wing. Cause you, you
know a lot of times it’s a nice day and you climb up there to fill your tanks and it’s
fine.
But I remember one time I was filling up at a dock in Katchacan and there was a
filler way out on the end of the wing on a standard Beaver and I was out there
eight feet above the water filling the tank and a sand boat came by making a
three foot wake and that wing started to go up and down about I don’t know, it
must have been about 10 feet and all I had was a, was a gas filler hole to stick a
couple of fingers in. I felt fairly vulnerable out there.
So, Jerry Lawhorn, he did put a couple of posts, called them goat ears or
something on top of the wing that I could hang onto and we used those for a
while and then they decided it was, I thought they were great but they did more
study of it and determined that this was causing a little flutter on the tail. I hadn’t
noticed that but so, they had to take those off.
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But, anything you can do to the airplane to make it easier to service you know,
like airline pilots or even most fix based charter operators, we were always
fueling our own planes and adding oil and that sort of thing. So if that can be
simplified, it just saves you time.
Another aspect of this is you know, a big airplane is, is a pretty complex machine
and there’s a whole lot going on inside of those engines with the controls and
everything and the simpler you can get those controls the easier it is for the pilot
to spend his time looking out the window instead of manipulating things. And that
was one of the things we didn’t like about the standard Beaver with the radial
engine that if you’re going to change your power setting you had to move the
throttle lever and then you had to adjust the mixer control, the carburetor
temperature and you had about three or four things to do.
So, you are doing that and you’re not looking out the window. Well, the turbine
Beaver is better, a lot better. You just had one lever and so you could be looking
out the window and add a little power without studying the panel.
Well I would say basically waterfowl management in North America in the 50
years, I’ve been associated with it is pretty successful. The, you know, coming
out of the dust bowl era, there was a lot of discouragement about waterfowl and
you can see it in their reports and literature and even things like I talked about
earlier where Spencer Smith said we’ve got to get every acre we can.
And if you look at the total figures now the duck numbers are in total continent
wide about the same as they were in the 50’s. There’s been some ups and
downs and some periods of worry. So, basically the things the Service is doing
and the things you know other contributors like Ducks Unlimited are working and
seem to be. But there are some places that are causes for concern.
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In Alaska, the geese on the Yukon delta took a big dive and there are some
provisions that the Service has made. It’s a difficult thing because it’s all
wrapped up in cultural aspects of the native community there but bit by bit they’re
getting the Upic Eskimos to recognize that they need to contribute too or we’re
going to lose some of these stocks. But there is a lot of vacant habitat for geese
in western Alaska that was a lot more areas that were occupied by the first bird
reporters.
So, that was one thing that’s down and I think the Service has done a good job
but I don’t see an objective to return to the level of abundance that the early
people found. They’ve set some numbers objectives and I suppose when those
become accomplished maybe they can be raised and eventually geese
reestablished in some of these areas that are now vacant.
So, that’s one area of concern and I guess the other one would be the well
another goose area that’s a matter of concern is the Copper River delta and the
dusky Canada geese which that area was up lifted six feet by the earthquake in
1964 and it changed the whole hydrology of the area and changed the way
predators had access to the goose nesting areas so there’s that problem but also
they go to a very limited wintering area in the Walamet valley so that’s an area
that is a matter of concern.
And then with the ducks, the ducks seem to being doing well in Alaska, the
dabbling ducks, some of the diving duck species are going down, some of it may
be just normal fluctuations. The oldsquaw duck, which has recently been re-christened
the long tail, duck numbers are going down and nobody’s quite sure.
There because they’re not a big species in the hunting bag and they don’t occupy
habitat that seems to be damaged much. But the Service is starting to do some
research on the diving ducks and that’s good and ascrotis is another species
that’s getting some attention for the first time you know,
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It used to be the hunters weren’t returning the bands there was no need to pay
any attention to them and then we got two species of eiders that are on our
threatened list but are fairly abundant in Siberia, the stellar eider and the
spectacle eider. And it seems to be turning out that one of the serious things that
happened to those species, they used to be quite abundant.
When I was refuge manager on the Yukon delta, I didn’t have any trouble finding
both those species. to take pictures of the females on their nests and I got
pictures of, the females aren’t very spectacular but the males are. And I could,
you know that was one of the things I was trying to take pictures of and then a
period came along where people going out there just didn’t find them and so they
were put on the threatened list and actually as a result of my petition.
That’s the kind of thing you can do after you retire and that resulted in more
money for eider studies, there was nobody looking at them and one of the things
they found was that the eiders are picking up a lot of lead out there in those
ponds where they nest and were suffering from lead poisoning and I don’t think
the natives have paid much attention to the lead shot, steel shot thing until that
came up but they’re learning about that and some of them are responding and
you know those are things that take time and I think the, a lot of the natives out
there are well, working on these things too, now to try and get the lead out and
it’s a problem. For some reason you know, there is always this theory that well, if
you shot lead into the mud or into ponds with a mud bottom the, it would
eventually go out of reach for the birds, I think there’s more questioning now then
there used to be on that score but these ponds on the Yukon delta freeze solid,
the whole works, the water and the mud and everything and I guess there’s some
evidence that you know, like the fields in New England, the frost keeps bringing
things up instead of letting them settle down and so they’re not seeing it
disappear so the eiders are a matter of concern and it’s going to take some time
to resolve the hunting problems out there on the coast where there’s a strong
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tradition for summer and spring waterfowl hunting. It’s not a matter of nutrition
anymore which may have been but I always think it would be like telling the rest
of us that we couldn’t have Christmas trees anymore you know, and we’d figure
out ways to, it would take a long time to, for us to get used to not having
Christmas trees. Some people would go on with it right away and others would
try and sneak a tree in. So that’s what’s going on out there now and it’s just
taking time.
Oh, I think it’s enormously important and –
The aerial survey thing, before you know, the flyway biologist concept went back
to the dust bowl days when ducks were really disappearing and you read these
stories from John Lynch and some of those other people that were trying to figure
out what was going on and, and they had permission to ride in military aircraft
and they had a terrible time trying to talk military pilots into flying low and slow
and that didn’t work, it just wasn’t (cough) and they tried to do surveys in the
prairies from railroad trains, they couldn’t do them from roads because in the
spring when they needed to be in there looking at duck production the roads
were all muddy and they’d just get stuck and wouldn’t get any surveys done but
they could go down the railroad tracks and they’d try riding the passenger trains
and somebody finally decided they could do better if they could get permission to
ride in the caboose of the freight trains which went slower and had better visibility
and all these things were tried but it wasn’t until they started using airplanes after
World War II in some cases ex-military pilots but some of the other guys got a
few hours flying in a supercub or Cub then and like, John Lynch and started
flying there you know, and before the airplane thing came by you know the
regulations were set on the basis of, of winter inventories and a lot of that was
pretty superficial without aircraft and when the airplanes came they then began to
do a winter inventory which continues to this day but was really needed was, if
you look at them in the winter they got tough weather to deal with and a spring
migration so if you really want to put some precision in this thing you ought to
33
know how many birds survived to get back on their nesting grounds and then
take a look and see what their productivity rate is, like how many ducklings they
produce because some years even if they get back the weather’s bad or the
habitat is too dry (cough) or something’s the matter and you get poor production.
So, if you can figure out the production and the, a factor for the number that
came back then you really can’t do it. It’s not a census in that sense. What
you’d learn is whether numbers are better then last year or worse and you know,
these surveys are so consistent now with airplanes that predictions that you get
10% more are valid. It comes at the time you need it and then the regulatory
process is kind of a mad scramble to analyze data and set regulations that will
give you the level of kill that you think you can stand and you then get them
printed and out to hunters before the duck season starts so, really it’s a grand
production and it seems to work.
Yeah, well, it was recognized first the need to have good information in the spring
and different methods were tried to achieve that and it wasn’t till enough people,
enough biologists got flying and they discovered that they could generate the
broad scale, you know contin, continent wide level of information that became
effective in, in you know, predicting what birds were going to be on the hunting
grounds and how many of them you should take and then the other thing that
happens is all this information is recorded and of course it was recorded in files
initially but it’s now all well computerized. Every year you know, it’s an art
predicting these things even with the information but now with 50 years of
experience behind that all adds to the picture as well and the people at the ducks
can say oh, well this is the year it looked like 1965 and that year we did thus and
so and we killed a little more then we should so you know, you get that kind of
experience or maybe we could have killed more that year so, it’s still sort of an
art but it’s improving with experience and will continue to improve I’m sure but the
basic system since the airplanes came in really hasn’t changed much, a few
adjustments here and there and one of the interesting aspects of the sampling
procedure is that it violates some rules randomness that bothers statisticians and
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it, it has to be sort of a trade off between randomness and the practical aspects
of flying the airplane and how you can get out there and do things effectively and
efficiently at a reasonable cost and then there’s the human aspect of just
recording visual information as, you know, it’s not as good as, as what having a
photograph or some permanent record so those things have bothered people
and they talk about bias and this thing and there have been a number of, or
several detailed studies that have determined that even though there are biases
of this nature, it works and various professionals have criticized the thing and
probably will continue to, in the mean time it’s working. I guess that’s what I
wanted to say and the critics are looking at pieces to the whole picture, the whole
thing works and it works because of the combination of, of aerial you know,
aircraft equipment and the experience of the people doing the flying. There isn’t,
you can’t talk air survey in collage and get a degree in it. It’s something that’s,
and you really can’t, there isn’t a cookbook for it. It’s something that’s passed
from experienced pilots to new pilots and it’s working.
Well, I don’t see any substitute for the –
Well, the, the aviation, the airplanes are essential to, to getting the kind of
information that’s necessary for managing waterfowl and another aspect of it is
you know, you’re using the medium the birds do, that’s important in
understanding what they’re faced with and how their year is going and so I don’t
see any substitute for using airplanes. About airplanes in the future, well, the
basic single engine high wing, there is a lot of low wing airplanes on the market
and they’re of course useless for this sort of thing. You have to have the wing
above so you can look down and most of those planes were designed in the
1930’s, the basic aeronautics and some of them like the Beaver was in the
1940’s I guess, like the turbine Beaver that we’ve been talking about has a
plaque in it with a manufacturer date of 1952 and you know, what, what I often
think of people get quite excited when they see a nice 1952 model automobile on
the street, think oh, that’s a real antique. They don’t think that with airplanes but
35
there’s been tremendous oh, innovation with regard to materials and engines and
power plants and at some point I think they’ll be a lot of improvements that we
don’t necessarily envision now like you know airplanes that are riveted together
with pieces of aluminum to a major degree. There are going to be lighter
materials that are maybe stronger and if you get a –
Well of course, I think the flyway biologists have always had cameras and –
Flyway biologists have always had cameras and taken pictures and been
interested in photography and in a few cases it’s been useful, like particularly
with snow geese because you’ve got good contrast between the background.
We tried endlessly to take pictures of blank brant at Eisenbeck lagoon though
and you don’t have the contrast there so even if you had some kind of a
computer sensor you probably wouldn’t, wouldn’t get it. The infrared doesn’t
work on brant because they’re so efficiently feathered that they don’t loose heat
and you know, snow can fall on their backs and it won’t melt and they’re just not
registering on infrared so, and then people have tried to oh, use movies and
other gadgetry but to a certain extent you wind up with a pile of film that takes
more time to analyze then, then you know, just a bunch of stuff. So, for the time
being anyway I don’t see a, a photograph substituting for visual. You know, they
say that the computer that thinks better then the man will be here one of these
days but it’s not yet. I guess they do have computers that will count little blips if
you can get the proper contrast or whatever but, it’s not here. It’s not on the
horizon I don’t think.
Well, David Spencer you know, was one of the pioneers in the prairies, he didn’t
stay there very long but he, he was a key in developing the transect survey
techniques that we use today almost un-modified even though he did it with a
pencil and a pad of lined paper and now it’s done with voice recorders and
computers but the technique has lent itself to you know, being dealt with by a
modern technology and the basic observations are the same. So, Spencer was
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extremely important and he was in Alaska, he, there was a couple of things about
Spencer. He had this background prior to World War II he was in the refuge
system I think in Florida somewhere but he spent a year in Wisconsin studying
under Aldo Leopald and he worked on some projects with Olis Murie in Wyoming
and when he came to Alaska people were still thinking in terms of how to get a
sustained yield out of reindeer and out of fur bearers and you know, controlling
wolves was one of the techniques that was used for conservation work and, and
there was still a major effort to get rid of the keen-eye moose range and the
kodiak, the keen-eye was in demand for home steaders and the kodiak refuge
was in demand for cattle ranchers and the he was the first wave of biologists that
weren’t, the game agents were, were really thinking about preventing you know,
law violations and developing regulations, hunting regulations and trapping
regulations and, and I didn’t realize this at the time but Spencer was the first one
that had the sense of wilderness that you know, he was there when it was
emerging amongst Leopold and his students and his associates and so he
brought that to Alaska and I think a lot of the refuges were administrative order
refuges which can be reversed by another administrator and in fact that was what
had happened to the first I think they called it a sanctuary on the Yukon delta set
up by Teddy Roosevelt that was abolished by Warren Harding in his wisdom.
We don’t know much about that. It would be fun to dig up the records on that.
But, anyway Spencer was important in the, you know, we brag about our
wilderness in Alaska that’s going to be there in putuety and I think he deserves
the credit for getting the agency as well as the other people in Alaska thinking in
terms of the value of wilderness and that we need to, needed to do it now rather
then think you know, there was quite a strong feeling oh, Alaska’s safe we need
to put our money in our effort down south where all the people are tearing things
up and he did these first pioneering waterfowl survey then the next, well,
Clarence Road was important with his attitude towards flying and that we should
all learn to fly government airplanes if we wanted to and he really encouraged
that and he got the money, he got it from Albert Day who was the Director that
really, he had very good rapport with Day and we hear stories about how the
37
other regional directors were pretty irritated with Roads cause he got everything
he wanted and they all had to struggle for what they needed but I don’t know
whether that’s true or not but in any event Roads was important in encouraging
the flying and then bringing Hank Hanson who sort of built on some of the early
work Dave Spencer had done and he set up a program for not only doing the
duck surveys, Hank Hanson started the studies on trumpeter swans. He tried to
get a little banding project in each one of these valleys that in most cases are
now national wildlife refuges and find out where those birds, you know who was
using them and he set this thing in motion and then I followed Hank Hanson and
pretty well, I built some on what he’d been doing but I didn’t go in like so often
happens when project leaders change and make a new start. I liked the work
he’d done and I worked with Hanson quite a bit before he left doing banding and
doing surveys and then Bruce Colnut came to work for me. He worked for me for
about five years before I retired. I did the waterfowl project for 20 years and then
Bruce has now been there for over 20 years and he’s built on the Hank Hanson
program and there’s more money in the, most of the time until Bruce came along,
I was a one man project and then I had Bruce for five years. Now there are three
of them in the waterfowl project and Jack Hodges was the second one and he’s a
guy with a wildlife degree and a biometrics advanced degree and a good grasp of
computer programming and when I left the project in 1983 the Service was using
main frame computers in Alaska and had some in Anchorage but that stuff was
still kind of on the horizon and I worked pretty hard with computer programmers
in Anchorage trying to get oh, things like the swan data computerized and it was
really hard working with a computer programmer that didn’t know anything about
wildlife. The thing that bothered me was they always wanted to change the data
so that it would fit into their computer better. I’d have to think, well what are we
doing this for anyway and I didn’t, I didn’t get very far with that. Well then Jack
Hodges came along working for Bruce Connie and he was able to, he’s a pilot
too, he flies the turbine Beaver and knew how to write the programs to handle the
data that was useful to the, that was easy for the pilots to manage as well as
being, meet the standards of the migratory bird station here and he just came up
38
with all sorts of good innovative stuff and the desktop computers were coming
out then so that all has happened since you know, I was still essentially with a
pencil when I retired and now they’ve got really good computer capability and
one of the things that’s exciting to me I guess I mentioned this before is that so
much of the data that I’d stored away in the files but never had a, a chance to
completely work up Bruce Conin and Jack Hodges and they have a young lady
there Dever Groves and they’ve been able to archive this old data and it’s
comparable with newer stuff and have turned out a lot of really good publications
and papers and taken what was sub-grade literature and added it to the literature
of, you know, of the peer reviewed literature of waterfowl science. So, what
you’ve got is in Alaska a waterfowl program starting in 1956 to 2001 with very
strong continuity and that's actually pretty rare in the government I think and kind
of exciting and it was exciting to be part of that and Bruce is not to far from
retiring now so whether it will keep going or not well, who knows but so far so
good it's almost 50 years and it's set a good record.
Bob may have some other comments on that. This might be worth. Alaska's a
long way from Washington DC and the Patuxant and because of the you know ,
Juneau's a long way from Anchorage and I think we had a level of freedom that,
it's disappearing now but we could attack things that --
In Alaska we had the freedom to innovate I think, partly it was an aspect of a
small number of people a long ways from kind of the establishment. Oh, I think
the way Jack Hodges has developed his own computer programs is an aspect of
that. He just did it and oh, we got into other areas. We got into things I got
involved with eagle surveys. I don't think anybody down here is doing, you know,
the waterfowl biologists--
(I had to turn the tape over so I missed some)
39
--- where there's an eagle nest every half mile on an average for hundreds of
miles of coast and the game agent that I worked with in Juneau was watching
this and nobody had any concept of how many eagles or where they were until
we got out with the airplane and started plotting them and went to the forest
service and said how can you allow these loggers to cut all these eagle trees
when, showed them the bald eagle act and you know, allowing a law violations
here and that resulted in a good program to protect eagle trees in the Tongas
forest and we got involved with the, you know, I did some of the first sea bird
surveys with an airplane because here was a oil industry talking about drilling for
oil and they did in Cook inlet and at that time you know they were in the wild and
woollies of Alaska and everything they didn't need went over the side and the
Fish and Wildlife guys brought them up short on that and there were the tankers
that were coming in to Cook inlet were pumping oily bilge and killing birds and so
we all got kind of fiddling around with the sea birds and then when the oil
development became more serious suddenly there was money to, to do some,
some sea bird studies in Alaska and what they call the Auxcet program
(inaudible) continental shelf, something or other and we had a good idea then of
what we needed to do and how we could use airplanes to do it and but I did
some air surveys in Bristol bay which was on the hot list for, for oil drilling that
hasn't happened there because it's so important for fish but there were lots of
sea birds in the water but also ducks as well so I said well, I can go out there and
look at them, get some figures and I had a system of, I called it a saw tooth
survey where I'd go out eight miles and back eight miles and go down the coast
that way because most of the birds are close to shore. So, we had to freedom to
do that sort of thing so we were ready when suddenly some guy from
Washington shows up and he's got three days to write a program for doing
studies for oil development in Bristol Bay and hey, we've been there and I can't
remember that guys name. He was an interesting guy. He gathered a bunch of
people together in the regional office in Anchorage like on Wednesday and he
said I'm going back to Washington on Friday and I need to have a report on bird
studies that are needed and he talked to the Fish and Game biologists and he
40
says I need, you know what you want for, for sea mammals and one of these
guys you know, they don't want the Federal government putting any time
restraints like that on them and he said well, we can do that, it would take us
about a month and this guy says I'm going to turn in a report on the need for sea,
for sea mammals studies in that area on Monday morning and if you don't have it
to me on Friday, I'm going to write it on the airplane and but, he didn't have to
say that to the bird people because we'd kind of been sniffing around and we
knew something about where the birds were and that kind of, you know that went
back. Are you familiar with Ira Gabrilson?
He was director for 10 years, Fish and Wildlife Director and but he was a real
birder, birds was his passion and every summer that he was Director he spent a
month or two birding in Alaska and of course being Director he could command
ships and planes and cars and whatever he wanted and then he and Frederick
Lincoln who was the guy who set up the banding lab produced a monumental
book on the birds of Alaska and it was Gabrilson's observations and Lincoln's
research really you know, there's a 50 page bibliography in that book and it's
wonderful. But Gabrilson had paid attention to the, to the sea bird rookeries.
He's got on these, they had some pretty good vessels at the time for fisheries
work and, and he'd take these big boats out for bird watching, had a grand time.
So, there were good descriptions of some of the bird colonies from Gabrilson of
course, they looked up all the literature preceding and so, it was a little of
following up on you know, we did know, knew something about birds and now the
Service has a very good sea bird program as you described in your video of
monitoring sea bird colonies but none of that was going on in the, in the 60's and
70's.
Well, having the Migratory bird office for waterfowl surveys in Juneau has been a
sore spot with the people in Anchorage for a number of years. Juneau of course
in the capital of Alaska and that's where the regional headquarters was in
territorial days and then after statehood the regional office was abolished and
41
most of the people transferred and the, when I, when I came on as, as the
waterfowl position then it was called supervisor of waterfowl investigations and
what I supervised was myself mostly because people were disappearing in all
directions but it was based in Juneau and I tried to move it to Fairbanks where I
was familiar with but I was told it had to be in Juneau and I got settled there and I
just barely got settled when they started trying to move me other places but
Juneau's, my wife liked it there and it's a nice community to raise a family and I
looked at the possibilities, let's see they wanted to move me to Portland first and I
didn't want to do surveys in Alaska from a base in Portland so I managed to get
out of that and then they, several times they wanted me to come back here and
then when the regional office was established in Anchorage it's always bugged
the regional staff in anchorage that that project's in Juneau but it's a good place
for a project like that because it, there was a time when they took all the flyway
biologists out of the regional offices cause the regional directors wouldn't leave
them alone and they'd be called on to attend meetings endlessly and never
would get their surveys written up and that's another interesting aspect of the
duck survey business. The flyway biologists go out and do a survey and they
have it available, written up, analyzed and available for distribution within a week
or two and so often, in fact the norm for biologists is to go out and get a bunch of
data and work on it all winter and maybe two or three winters and there's an
awful lag between the field work and the finished paper and the flyway biologists
well, they got things in order so zap it comes right out and I don’t know of any
other project that operates under that kind of a time straint. Do you Bob?
We were free of being called on the hall for every ceremonial event in the
regional office and we had a nice office that had big windows facing down
Gastanol channel, I could see the swans going by when they were migrating and
occasionally there'd be hump back whales I could see from my office window and
any ships coming into Juneau harbor and it was a pleasant place to work. So, I
had a good office. I had a place my family liked. I had a, actually had you know,
the kind of beach property you've got to be a CEO or a agency director to be able
42
to afford around here and I got five acres on the waterfront in Juneau and so it
was a good place for my family and I just could see how I could take my family a
suburban home in Anchorage or back here somewhere and Hank Hanson came
back here before me and I remember talking to his daughter one time about, they
had lived right in downtown Juneau and she felt like she'd, she was a teenager,
she'd lost all of her freedom. She came back where she was dependent on her
parents to take her anywhere she wanted to go and in Juneau she'd been able to
walk or bike to all the things she was interested in so staying in Juneau appealed
to me and I think the same thing with Bruce and it still irritates the regional office
that we're there but I think they recognize that there's a good flow of information
comes out of that Juneau office that maybe it isn't a good idea to interrupt that.
43
Cal Lensink
5/10/01
Q Your name, and then talk about your education and your career.
Actually I started out at the McAllister college and an English Professor there
assigned us a theme on what we were going to be and directed us to the
vocational files and at that time I was in Pre-med and it was in the vocational files
that I found that there was such a thing as wildlife management and so I had to
transfer schools right away and I’ve been pretty much on one track every since. I
graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1950 and then took a year of post
grad work there and then went to the University of Alaska for my masters degree
and then from there if you don’t have a permanent job, you continue on in school
and I got a PHD from Purdue.
Q What is your employment history?
The, my earliest work was with the Minnesota Department of Conservation, one
year one summer as a, working on a fisheries research crew and the second
year on duck lakes surveys and then I worked part time in the winter and then
went, went to Alaska after that and I worked on several temporary jobs as, when
I was a student in Alaska and then in 1957 I went to work for the state of Alaska
and worked for them three years when I began working for the Fish and Wildlife
Service on the Rampart project on the Yukon flats.
Q Describe the Rampart project, what was that all about?
The Rampart project was a proposal pushed very strongly by an Alaska senator
Greening, to put a dam across the Yukon river rampart and that would have
created a, a power dam and a lake behind it of about ten thousand square miles
which would have completely inundated the Yukon flats which is the premier
44
waterfowl production area in interior Alaska and fortunately the, the, the dam did
not go in and actually a lot of the information that we collected at the time of the
rampart project was used for establishing the Yukon flats as a national wildlife
refuge. So, it—
Q What did you do as far as, were you surveying?
It was, as we were talking about earlier most of our work is surveys and
censuses and that’s what it was. We were trying to establish how big the
populations were and how productive they were and we set up a series of 20
sampling plots each of four square miles which we had a census by foot and
canoe three times during the summer, once for breeding population and then
twice for broods and in total, and then we had some larger study areas in
addition to our sampling plots but in total we hit between eight and nine hundred
lakes every summer at least three times.
Q Describe what life was like there, the support systems you had and how
self sufficient you had to be, sort of just get a feel of what Alaska was like.
The, well even yet my headquarters, the summer headquarters would be in Fort
Yukon but we didn’t see much of Fort Yukon because we were camped out most
of the time. But our supply base was in Fort Yukon and this is a small Indian
village maybe at that time, three or four hundred people and most of them were
still living off the land, they trap, they hunted a few of them had summer jobs in
construction but in Fairbanks or something like that but, but really they depended
very much on subsistence living, catching fish in the Yukon river in fish wheels
and hunting and trapping and some of them were very good at trapping. Now,
much of that is gone. There are very little trapping anymore compared to what
there was then.
45
Q What was the thing that made the Rampart project not go and was the
information you gathered convincing or did it just die of it’s own self or –
I think there were two major things, first the major environmental damage that it
would cause, caused a lot of the environmental organizations to strongly oppose
it but they really beat it on shear economics rather then wildlife values. It, it the
evidence said that the environmental groups put forward on the economics of it
was pretty convincing and so the project then died and I think projects like that
don’t tend to die and stay dead but I think every year puts a further nail in it’s
coffin though now with the energy crunch that we’ve got now they want to open
the Artic wildlife range for oil exploration. I can envision them wanting to develop
electrical power out of the Yukon, a renewed Rampart project with the problems
they’ve got in California now and so it, you never quite feel those projects have
gone away for good.
Q Bob Scott hiring for waterfowl?
Yeah, they, actually the, I got the fellowship to go to the University of Alaska for
my masters but that didn’t start until fall, but I came up in, in Spring, in May and
then flew out, I first worked for a couple of weeks on the University campus to
make ends meet and then in, in June I flew surveys over much of Alaska and into
Canada with Bob Scott and then he dropped me off at Holy Cross and told me to
pick up a boat and motors and so on there that they had stored there and I was
on my own, hire an Eskimo to work for me and he said the people, it was a
missionary town at Holy Cross and he told me that the, the missionaries there
would tell me who would be good to work for me and when I talked to them there
was one person left in town that needed a job and the missionary didn’t think
very much of him and I was stuck. It turned out that I probably got the best
person in town. He was very aggressive for an Eskimo or Indian, that probably
didn’t go over big in town where there was, might have been liquor or something
like that being in the field with me if I caught six ducks he had to catch seven and
46
so we had bang up summer. He was a first rate helper all the way and in those
years we didn’t have good maps so you really depended and I always enjoyed
working with a local Indian or Eskimo that knew more about living in the wild then
I did and could get along pretty well but the map I had then was cut out from an
air navigation chart in which only the main stem river of Anoco was shown,
Anoco and Ididerod and most of the map was printed in yellow labeled tarra
incognita. They didn’t know what the country was like even at that time and in, in
the early 1950’s they started the aerial mapping of Alaska, the Air Force started
that in the early 50’s and since then the maps have improved rapidly and
continue to improve.
Q What were you doing that summer? What was the mission at hand?
It was pretty much a natural history project on waterfowl on the Anoco. How
many were there but it focused more on banding and knowing where they went
to then, then anything else. We were a little too late in the season to do much
nest8ing work and not knowing the geography well enough anyway we couldn’t
set up any sampling system and I probably wasn’t able to do it then anyway with
the education I had at that time and, and so we banded birds with basically our
only equipment was a dip net which we had to run down every bird individually
and I think we banded a little over a thousand ducks and geese that summer.
Q Were there a lot of ducks there?
There were a lot of ducks there and a lot of geese using the edge of the river and
the, the boat I had was so slow that if you were following the geese along the
shore of the river, the geese could run faster then the boat could move but we
had a very small skiff and we could take the motor off the bigger boat which was
a 16 horse Johnson, an old fashion on, put it on the little boat which was fairly
dangerous I would say and then we could catch up. It was a fun summer but it’s
47
one of the two places I found more mosquitoes then any place I’ve been in
Alaska.
Q What did you do after that summer?
Then I, of course after the summer I started work at the University of Alaska and
my Master’s thesis was on Pine Martin, a fur bearing animal and I, I always really
wanted to work on mammals and ended up working on birds most of my career
and then after I was of the longest temporary employees the Service had had, I
think I got my, my ten year pin in career status the same year and it took two
years to get career status, I had eight years of temporary time one way or
another. But jumping from one project to another just where I was needed and
while it was always a, you were always sort of low man on the totem pole as far
as the pay was going, it was really the best part of my career and able to go and
do everything all over the state on different projects and whether it was
censusing moose or then my, I, one of the projects I was on was helping on the
Allusion Island refuge on a study on sea otters and there were some professors
from Purdue on the same project and that Christmas we became friendly and
that Christmas I sent one of the Profs a Christmas card and on the card jotted
that I was thinking of going back to school and that I was going to apply to
Berkley and the University of British Columbia to see whether I could get into one
of those. I knew the Profs from both those and I got an air mail letter back saying
come to Purdue and we’ll give you a scholarship so, I went to Purdue and I think
I was probably lucky. I’m not sure I would have made the grade at Berkley or –
Q What did you study at Purdue?
I was still in wildlife management and my major project was on sea otters. I sort
of topped my bet, I, when he told me that he’d give me a scholarship I said I’d
come to Purdue if I could work on a project in Alaska and suggested sea otters
48
since the Prof there knew a little bit about sea otters at least and that worked out
just fine.
Q Was there a problem with sea otters at the time?
Well, the sea otter population had, had become almost extinct about the turn of
the century and we knew that there had been some recovery in some areas and
during World War II a Navy pilot had censused just flown around Amchitka and
identified a lot of sea otters there and, and so then the refuge became interested
in and were contemplating transplant studies and so on to try to move them to
other areas of population. Alaska wide was still very, very small then and, but so
that was basically the way I got involved with that.
Q What was your work entailing locating colonies?
It was, I, I censused sea otters pretty well all through the laska where they were
and then it was just general life history, reproduction and behavior and, and but I
focused probably as much on anything as the, the history of the population. How
they had been exploited by the Russians and subsequently by, by the Americans
after the sale of Alaska and, and tried to make some estimate of how few there
had become and I thought that in Alaska the population might have dipped as
low as a couple of hundred animals and then when I was working on them, I
worked on them for several years of course and my thesis I had data up to oh,
’68 or ‘9 and I thought that by that time they had recovered to about 30,000 and,
but they, they didn’t cross between islands very rapidly. They’d build up the
population and the bigger the population would get the deeper they’d have to
forage to get food and eventually get to another, another island. The, once the
population got that big though it expanded very, very rapidly. An interesting thing
now, it’s in the Allusions Island it’s going down hill again and it’s not all together
certain what it is but it looks like it may be predation by, by Orca, killer whales
that is, is having a major impact on them right now. There’s been a very sharp
49
decline in the numbers of seal lions and seals in the north pacific so, so much so
that sea lions are threatened or endangered and, and they were the primary food
of the killer whale and the killer whale has had to substitute anything it could get
and apparently it’s getting sea otters. At any rate the population of sea otters is
going down quite sharply in the western Allusions.
Q So, where did the sea otter study lead you? What was your next focus?
That lead, lead me to actually the, I was, before I even got my PHD, I went to
work for the state as head of the predator investigation and control and then I
worked for about three years for the state when I started the Rampart project
and, and on that I had, that was a split assignment. I spent winters in Patuxent
research center in Maryland and summers on the Yukon flats working for Hank
Hanson at the time and so that, that was pretty good experience. Being at
Patuxent for three years was very good and I’ve had breaks all the way through
my career. Let’s face it, interesting projects to work on and being the right
person, the right place at the right time, like the Rampart project. I was only one
that had done really much work on waterfowl on the ground in Alaska and so I
was the natural one to go in on that.
Q Get him to tell Garvon stories.
He was a biologist working as a temporary for me on the, on the flats and –
Just Garvon would be enough. It was things happen to him and we were in a
canoe one time and the water had been very high and the grass on the end of
the lake was flooded and we were in two Indian made canoes, real narrow
canoes and the, it, it was quite deep just a little ways off shore but he didn’t
realize that because there was grass in the water and so I, he was following me
and I, I got the bow of my canoe on shore, stepped out into ankle deep water and
he saw that I was in ankle deep water in the grass and so he was still in the
50
grass so he calmly put a leg over the canoe and tipped it over and he was in five
feet of water and then one other time he, we had a plot that was sort of tough to
do and so I sent him to do just about a third of the plot in the easy part and I
didn’t expect to be back until nine o’clock but I thought he’d be done by about
four or five in the afternoon and I got back about nine o’clock at night and no
Garven and it was obvious he hadn’t been in camp and so I started out looking
for him and finally it got too dark and I had to go back to camp and then I was up
about three in the morning to track him down and I could track him to see where
his canoe went in and out of water and I actually found him, he was on his way
home, he had figured out where he was but he’d spent all night out and but he
had lost his watch and had no idea of what time it was or anything else and on
the last portage on to the home lake I was way ahead of him, being out all night
he was tired and but I was crossing the portage and there was a patch of
blueberries there and so I scooped a couple of handfuls and went on down the
lake shore and he saw that and he came by them and he said these would be
real good in pancakes. So, he wanted to stop and pick blueberries and I thought
anybody that’s been out all night wants to pick blueberries, I’ll pick blueberries
with him and so we had pancakes with blueberries that morning. But, then to
cork it off, the next year I had a kid form Canada working for me, a wildlife
student from Canada and he was on the same plot and if you couldn’t find the
lake you were heading for, you had them run compass courses through all these
ponds and you’d start climbing trees when you got anywhere near but Larry was
climbing a tree and coming down he found a watch in the tree and it was still
running and so it was Garven’s watch from the year before. I knew just who—but
here’s a tree 20 or 30 miles from the nearest village, way out in the wilderness
someplace and it was really funny.
Q Was he a native?
Garven?
51
Q Yes.
No a white man. He had a degree in wildlife management. It was, he seemed to
get in trouble all the time.
Q Were you working for the Service then?
I was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, that was part of the Rampart
project then, but that was sort of funny.
Q Did you work with Jim King?
I've worked with him but never for him. I've know him, he was a student at the
University of Alaska when I was there and then when I was at, on the split
assignment, Rampart and, and in Maryland he started as first manager of the
Yukon delta refuge which was then Clarach Road refuge and then he was there
just a year or two, a couple of years when he was offered Hank Hanson's job as
flyway biologist for Alaska and then the Rampart project was winding down and
Dave Spenser called me in Maryland and, and asked whether I wanted the
Yukon delta job and I sure did because I was either going to have to, it would get
me back to Alaska otherwise I was going to have to go full time in Maryland and
that didn't really interest me that much.
Q You went to become manager?
And then I was at Bethel for eleven years.
Q As manager?
Yeah.
52
Q Describe what that was like, relationships with the native populations, how
much support you had, was it just a caretaker kind of job?
The, it's when you think of refuges now and, and even what's on the Yukon Delta
now, we had a staff of four, a maintenance man, a secretary, an assistant
manager and myself and the refuge at that time was about six and a half acres
and so we had our hands full but, and our budget was so small it was in the
seventy thousand range that the first day of the fiscal year we could have a fixed
cost for our airplane, for fuel, electricity, light and salaries and we were in the
hole, on the first day of the fiscal year and yet we ran a pretty good project out
there because I wrote Profs all around the country and, and told them that we
had, we couldn't afford temporary helper for the most part but that if they had
students to come out there that we would, we would furnish them the logistics
since our airplane was paid for and we had boats and, and that worked out really
superbly a Prof from Purdue sent some students out and Dennis Ravling from
University of California sent students out and we had a student from Canada and
so there were several masters and PHD projects that went on when I was there
and so we ended up with a really good program, really I had no wish to leave
Bethel really but the last three years I was there I was on constant detail doing
other things, other then the refuge so that the refuge program was sort of going
to pot from my point of view because a fourth of the staff was gone, that was me
and I was the one, the only one interested really in research but I had been the
detailed on the Alaska natural interest lands legislation and I was pretty much
involved in that for, for three years and I, I averaged about two hundred and
ninety days away from home, so trying to live in Bethel and, and doing the other
things is just almost impossible so in the, that was finished I,
(Tape change)
Q What politics were involved? How the refuges and the lands were divided
up. What the process, a little bit of history of how that all came about.
53
The, the national interest lands in Elka I think probably had a longer history then
most people think, from my point of view at any rate but a lot of the
environmental organizations long before Elka got interested in the artic wildlife
range and, and as sort cause celebra, and, and so they had, had a large coalition
of environmental organizations that fought for that and then at the time that the
Native claim the settlement act sometime later the artic range was originally
established by Ydal who had, had blocked oil development up there until the
range was established, she set everything up as a monument and, and they
couldn't really move forward with the oil development until some of the
environmental issues were settled and in this group of organizations was still
together and so they were interested in preserving more land as refuges and
parks in Alaska. At the same time we had John Dingle who is very interested in
refuges as a whole and was interested in, in lands in Alaska as a refuge and he
requested the Service identify lands in Alaska that, that would be good as
refuges and that's the point I really came in directly. Jim Keagan and I were
mostly because we were the only ones free and could go probably and we also
had, he had flown more over Alaska and seen waterfowl and I had worked on the
ground in several locations. We're sent to Washington, DC to identify refuge
lands, land suitable for refuge in Alaska but we had absolutely no idea how, what
we were going to ask for, whether it was ten thousand acre, a hundred thousand
acres, a million acres. We had no framework, nobody in Fish and Wildlife
Service who could tell us what we were supposed to be doing but we started on
a series of briefings on what we were going to do, it was, everything in the cart
was before the horse and it was sort of funny and then John Dingle learned we
were in town to respond to his question and asked us up to come up and brief
him and during the briefing, Jim King asked Dingle, pointed out to Dingle, we had
no frame of reference. We didn't know what we were supposed to be identifying,
whether ten thousand or a million acres and, and Dingle came right back, he said
I want you to identify everything in Alaska that you'd think would be good for a
refuge and we both pointed out that was very easy to do if, if you had ten
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thousand acres to select, you'd probably take a seabird island but if you could
grab everything and we were on the floor with a map of Alaska with John Dingle
and, and we're on the floor drawing, lines around all the places in Alaska that we
thought would make good wildlife refuges and then that went into the native
claims act but not just as refuges, it was parks, refuges and everything else and
the native claims act director the secretary to select up to 80 million acres of, of
lands in Alaska that would be suitable for national parks or monuments or, and
split it up among the four systems BLM, Butmars preservation recreational areas
and I was involved in selecting then of lands and, and preparing impact
statements, environmental statements for, for the lands we selected and initially
the legislation went in dividing the land fairly evenly between BLM Parks Service,
Forest Service and Fish and Wild life Service and I 've often thought that Don
Young should get a metal for his conservation effort, he was very much opposed
to the refuge in this legislation and so when, when the Secretary of the Interior
went in for 83 million acres instead of 80 million acres he was most upset and he
put in another bill for 16 and said it be comprised someplace in between and then
the environmental organizations, much the same ones that had pushed for the
Artic wildlife range said, no it will be a compromise between anything we might
want in your 16 million and they got everything they wanted. They got about 130
million acres into the refuge and parks systems and BLM was pretty well cut out
and the forest was pretty well cut out. The original legislation I think, asked 23
million acres of refuges and we ended up with 52 million acres and it was just a
fantastic thing to be --
Q Talk about women and biology and field work.
The, there were very few in the early days. People went into wildlife
management because they like hunting or fishing and, and there were just almost
no women involved and if they were involved it was usually through a University
system like the University of Alaska had a first rate ornithologist Brina Kessel that
was employed but in must have been 1967 or 1968 one of the Profs wanted to
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send up a girl onto the refuge and, highly recommended her so I and another
Prof also wanted to bring up a girl a, a student that they'd started in wildlife and I
was perfectly happy with that and, and so they came out on the Yukon Delta and
then our regional office, we were under Portland at the time rather then the
Alaska Regional office, were so fascinated by it that they wanted a news release
of these girls working in a remote areas of Alaska, on a refuge and I sent them
the information and some pictures and it hit AP and it was all over the country. It
was just an unheard of thing as late as the late 1960's that you'd have a women
working in a remote area in a field camp. It seems strange now but it was sort of
funny because that fall I was on my way to a meeting in Florida on a plane and I
was sitting with a nice looking lady and she, we started talking and I told her I
was from Alaska and she asked whether I had heard about this women working
in the boonies of Alaska for Fish and Wildlife Service and I said yes, they work
for me. I wouldn't have dared tell her that but in my brief case I had two sheets of
slides I could haul out to show them to her and, but then shortly after that there
was really strong government involvement in equal opportunity which extended
to women as well as racial groups and when, then when I started the, the marine
bird shop in Anchorage there were, almost nobody with any experience and so I,
I hired a lot of women in that job and some of them are still working. In fact, all of
them are, that I hired are, are in the field yet and some of them in Alaska, yet but,
the we had a really nice person as a EEO officer at the time but she heard me
make some derogatory comment about EEO, that I didn't, didn't like the program
and, and of course she hadn't heard, over heard the whole conversation, she just
heard that much and so as a project leader that she didn't think was supporting
her Eeo program, she, she complained to the Regional Director and the Regional
Director told her to talk to the Assistant Regional Director who is, and, and then
called me and said sooner or later she'd be down there to see me but the
Assistant Regional Director then directed her to my boss and my boss finally sent
her to me and then she walked in the room and I had this trophy on the wall that I
got from my contribution award that I got from my contribution to EEO for hiring
so many women and minorities and, and she told me what she'd overheard and I
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said yes, I don't like the program I said all you do is hire the best people you can
get and let the chips fall where they may and they might be minorities or women
and that's what I had done basically and about half, better then half my staff at
that time was women and all of them working in the field and --
Q Talk about Hank Hansen? Saving the Spring Water puddle survey with
Hank Hansen.
Not quite sure the, Hank Hansen was continuing surveys after, after Bob Scott
had started them actually Dave Spenser had flown the earliest one and he was
followed by Bob Scott but because Spenser was actually part of the refuge
supervisor at the time and wasn't, but he had been a flyway biologist before he
came up here so he at least started some surveys in Alaska and then Bob Scott
set up surveys over most of the important waterfowl areas in the state and then
he left and, and Hank Hansen took over and he was initially flying the same
survey lines as, as Scott had set up and, and, and I was working for Hank mostly
on the ground and doing some air ground work and so on and but, we realized
that the surveys weren't a very statistically sound sampling system that, that a
small area might have as many transect lines and be sampled as heavily as a big
area and it didn't all make sense so in 1956 I think it was or before, before the
surveys were flown in 1956, Hank and I laid out all the transect lines that they're
using now and then Hank flew those for years and years and at that time he was
flying a piper pacer and on floats and which meant that you had to have gas on
lakes in any place you went and it had limited range compared to what they've
got now. It was a huge, huge job to--
Q Was the Piper an under wing plane?
No it was, the Piper they had then, the Piper Pacer was a high wing. It's, it's I
was going to say something like it's got a bigger fuselage, it's actually a four
placed plane but it's smaller wing spread and so on then a cubby did so it's sort
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of a hot little airplane but it didn't perform to well on water and, and it didn't have
range or so on. It just wasn't a very good airplane. The first really good airplane
for survey work we had was a 180 and that was, that was a fine airplane and
then from that we went to 185 and now to 206 now the turbo beaver which is
probably the best thing that ever happened to the surveys up here.
Q There's only one though.
There's only one. It's too bad we don't have a dozen of them.
Q We just did a video on trying to get a new era of, a new airplane
specifically designed for survey work.
They aught to start out with a beaver and go from there. The, the 206 is, is on
amphibious floats, the 206 from my point of view is a dog, When I talked to them
in place they land and so on I would, they just can't begin to get in and out of the
places we did with straight floats and yet nowadays to get fuel and so on you
almost have to be able to land on land and so there, there in a sense good
survey airplanes, the best available now but there is nothing really great.
Q His work for research under Dirk Durkson. Only smoking office they
tolerated because of Cal's pipe.
I had an office of my own though with windows but I smoked for years and years
and years I guess and I got the message all of the sudden, better quit. I had a
stroke in 1993, I think, that was after I retired though. I kept--
Q Dirk Durkson?
Durkson replace me, I was head of research and then I, have you ever read the
Peter Prince book and you know what percussive sublimation is? So, I was
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bounced up to where I couldn't do any damage and Dirk took over my job, so I
ended up working for Dirk, that worked out fine but it but I continued to smoke my
pipe. I, I it was almost part of me. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and
reach for my pipe.
It's still funny even yet I, I'm usually wearing a dog whistle and once in a while
you know, when you're nervous or something like that I'll have the whistle in my
mouth and reach into my pocket for a cigarette lighter.
Q How long was your career? When did you retire?
I retired in 1988 actually and but then kept my office in the Fish and Wildlife
Service for several years longer. I think in 1989 I put in a full years time working
for Fish and Wildlife service as a volunteer because for the Exxon Valdez spill I
ran all the morgues and then did a lot of right up on the, on the dead sea otters
and birds and then --
(end of side one)
--In a profession that you really like, you just, you might retire but that means you
quit getting paid and but--
Q Looking at the future of maybe, let's keep it to waterfowl, how do you,
where do you see the Service pretty much expanding in some areas, do you see
them expanding in some areas? What do you see in the evolution of the Fish
and Wildlife Service?
There's been a lot of evolution of the Fish and Wildlife Service even in the time I
worked and that's mostly due to legislation like when I started you had a office of
river base and surveys but you didn't have too much authority but you did good
work, now that's evolved into environmental statements and, and commenting on
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those and, and any Corp or Engineer project has to take Fish and Wildlife, there
are just lots of involvement, different involvement, on different kinds of
environmental matters. The endangered species for instance none of which was
there when I first started working.
Q Let's go back to endangered species and the changes you saw in that
and, and how the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has been changed in
certain aspects because of (inaudible).
So, so the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has spread out so much
since, since the early days because of new add ons and so on that has created I
think, a certain problem because the, the refuge division for instance is probably
always been under funded as compared to the Park Service it, it's played second
fiddle, we have more land, we do more with it then the Park Service does, you
can hunt and fish on our land or I can't help but saying our when I mean Fish and
Wildlife, our, I'll always work for Fish and Wildlife Service I guess but at any rate,
refuges have been under funded and been a problem, that's been a problem but
we've got refuges in every state now and, and so there's some resentment in the
refuge division against that lack of funding and feeling the Fish and Wildlife
Service the whole is draining funds from the refuges. I really don't accept that
thing, I think on early days at least it was partly the Systems fault and it's going to
take time to change but 20 years ago or 30 years ago refuge managers really
wanted a refuge to sort of lock it up and throw away the key and not let anybody
on them and it's only in the last couple of decades that they've realized that
visitor centers and public education and involvement of the public is important
and, and so that we're getting more and more public support but, but it'll take
time and I, I, it will probably never approach the monetary status of the parks so
we can't do as much and I think that's probably not all bad. I don't think we
should have as much money as the Parks Service have because that would
mean we were getting too many visitors.
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Q Did you have, was that a conflict, how was all that resolved between
traditional native uses and, and the Migratory Bird Act and those things?
Legally the natives have never been able to take waterfowl, they did, so basically
if an, a native shot a duck in spring, he was violating the law and when, when
you've lived off dry fish all winter and, and haven't had much else a goose in
spring tastes pretty good so there was pretty good justification for, for amending
the Migratory Bird Treaty to permit hunting in spring but the, it came out you
know you can't let a particular ethnic group hunt so it's done more on the basis of
the size of your community for and so on, and, and I think it's going to, could
create problems down the line but where do you, where do you saw it off and
how, how firm a regulation you can have. If they regulate the take in spring very
carefully it's fine but as a population in some of the remote areas increases it
could cause a problem so I'd like to, to, to see regulations pretty well enforced for
my own point of view. On the other hand this is a, a problem for the Fish and
Wildlife Service because when you've got very, very powerful Senators such as
Senator Stevens you don't want, and he's completely in support of the native
positions, that's where a lot of votes come from and it is for other Senators and
Representatives too, you're not going to do too much to bucky them and so there
probably hasn't been as much enforcement of laws against natives as might be
other wise possible. Looking back clear at the history of that--
Q When you were a refuge manager would you look the other way or were
you looking for violations or was your territory--
Basically, I, I told the natives I wasn't going to go out enforcing laws or try to find
them but if they shot a duck in front of me they better watch out and I never paid,
and basically they didn't, they, they they knew I sympathized with them to a very
large extent but when I was out there, their equipment was much inferior to now.
Now, they've got a fast boat with a 65 or 115 horsepower motor and they, they
can hunt three watersheds over from where they were and even when I was
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there you could see the rivers they lived in and the next river there would be any
geese on the river any more and then the further you got from a village there're
more geese and, and so that clearly subsistence hunting in spring had an impact
on waterfowl and then I think the Fish and Wildlife Service missed a bet, they
didn't recognize the amount of waterfowl that the natives were taking and so
seasons in California were set sort ignoring the native take and that, and then we
had some years of severe predation on the Delta, nesting predation and a
combination of those various things sent the goose population on the Yukon
Delta into a tailspin and the populations ended up less then a fourth of what they
were. I think Capplers we were concerned that it might have to be put on the
endangered list though, it fell short of that but,--
Q List some of your career, what your sense of feeling and accomplishment,
what are the highlights?
It was all sort of a highlight from my point of view. It was just, every job I had I
enjoyed. I think probably the least fun but the most important in that, that sense
of highlight was the National Interest Lands Act, the work I did for that but both
for, for just pure enjoyment and, and also accomplishing something the waterfowl
studies on Rampart and, and the initial studies on the Yukon Delta, the large
number of students that were able to pursue their careers when I was out there
were, were very good and then starting the marine bird program and, and a really
good program. All of those things are, I, I sort of walked from one highlight to
another. So, I had a much better career I think then most people ever get an
opportunity to have.
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Hank Hansen
Well, my real name is Henry Hansen but I don’t answer to that I answer only to
Hank and I have for many years.
Q What was your education?
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and I left right after I graduated from high school I
went to college in Nebraska, a little college in York, Nebraska that went to
defunct at the beginning or shortly after the beginning of World War II, just
weren’t enough students to keep the thing operating I guess. I got my Bachelor’s
Degree there and immediately went into the Service in fact, I was inducted before
I graduated and they, they deferred me until I got my degree because I was pre-med
and in those early days just before the war pre-meds and engineering
majors were all, they were—they, they let us, they let us finish our degree before,
but we understood that as soon as we got our degree no matter what we were
majoring in we were going to be inducted which I was. As a matter of fact, I take
some measure of pride in you may or may not remember, how that first, that first
induction was made. Franklin Roosevelt was President and his Chief Of the
Military, whatever it was called then, General Hershey and the first draftees,
General Hershey reached into a big fish bowl and brought out a handful of slips
of paper with names on, my name was in the first, the first handful of –
(airplane noise)
Well, he reached into that fishbowl and pulled out a handful of names and mine
was in that first handful. I was among the very first inductees but I was, as I say,
they let me alone until I graduated but as soon as I graduated I, I went in and I
was inducted into, into the ground troops into the field artillery and I could, I
couldn’t see my life flashing before my eyes out there pounding the turf so I
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enlisted in the Air Corp in the Army Air Corp and was accepted and that’s where
I, well I still had to go through basic training in the ground troops but after 14
weeks of that they released me and I went into the Air Corp before Pearl Harbor,
that was, this was early, early on and I went through flight school in Arkansas
and then I knocked around in many, many training units in the state side before I
eventually ended up in a fighter reconnaissance outfit in Europe and did all of my
oversees time flying P51’s in England and France and Germany and when I
came home I still had, I still had my intent to go back to med school, I had a
scholarship to the University of Nebraska, school of medicine and but I found out
in the meanwhile that there’d been a new science developed and it was called
wildlife management and that’s what I really wanted. The only, the only real
reason I found out that I wanted to go to med school was to make enough money
that I could hunt and fish all I wanted and when I found out here was a science
that had been developed that I could get into and it revolved around fish and
wildlife, game of all kind I immediately transferred to one of the very first wildlife
schools and that was Iowa State University and I got my Master’s Degree at Iowa
State and came out to Washington State at Pullman to get my PHD and then
took a job with the Washington State Game Department and I worked for them
seven, eight years before I had an opportunity to go to Alaska 19, well, I had a
chance to go to Alaska early but I had accepted a, a teaching job with
Washington State and Clarence Road came through and was taking an airplane
up to, to Alaska and he contacted me or vise versa and he wanted me to go up to
Alaska, he offered me a job and that was in 1947 and he offered me a job on the
spot to fly up with him. Well, I had just accepted a one semester teaching job at
Washington State and I didn't feel it was right to accept the job and then
immediately walk away and leave them with nobody to teach their wildlife
courses. So, I, I regretfully turned Clarence down at that time and then I went to
work for the state of Alaska, Department of Game--
Q State of Washington.
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Or state of Washington, Department of Game and I worked for them until, until
the spring of 1947, early '47 and a job became available in Alaska, a flying job,
flyway biologist job and it was the first one up there and I decided I just couldn't
pass it up again so, I left, I left the state of Washington and I went, I went to
Alaska and started flying that spring.
Q How was it in Alaska and the knowledge of waterfowl and management
and had there been any work done before or what was the science at that point?
Well, there had been a few cursory waterfowl surveys. Dave Spenser had done
a little surveying out on the Yukon Delta and Bob Scott had flown a survey for a
spring or two but they were, they were not very coherent, they were just kind of
exploratory and they and there was no attempt to really put things together and
make a, a program and, and determine what was up there, where it was, how to
go about making a good coherent survey comparable of what they were all ready
doing in the Canadian prairies and that was, that was my first shore was to locate
the waterfowl habitat, map the waterfowl habitat, determine how to go about
setting up the surveys so that I could do, I could replicate them year after year
and make sense out of what was there and we found out from the outset that
there was not way that we could compare the Alaska habitat and waterfowl with
what they were doing down in the Canadian prairies. It was, it was not adding
apples and oranges, it was even more diverse then that. So, I went ahead and
set up some surveys that were unique to Alaska, completely differen